“Expert review” of the First Order Draft of AR5 closed on the 10th. Here is the first paragraph of my submitted critique:

My training is in economics where we are very familiar with what statisticians call “the omitted variable problem” (or when it is intentional, “omitted variable fraud”). Whenever an explanatory variable is omitted from a statistical analysis, its explanatory power gets misattributed to any correlated variables that are included. This problem is manifest at the very highest level of AR5, and is built into each step of its analysis.

Like everyone else who participated in this review, I agreed not to cite, quote or distribute the draft. The IPCC also made a further request, which reviewers were not required to agree to, that we “not discuss the contents of the FOD in public fora such as blogs.”

Given what I found—systematic fraud—it would not be moral to honor this un-agreed to request, and because my comments are about what is omitted, the fraud is easy enough to expose without quoting the draft. My entire review (4700 words) only contains a half dozen quotes, which can easily be replaced here with descriptions of the quoted material. Cited section numbers are also easy to replace with descriptions of the subjects addressed. And so with Anthony’s permission, here is the rest of my minimally altered review:

Introduction to the “omitted variable fraud” critique, continued

For the 1750-2010 period examined, two variables correlate strongly with the observed warming (and hence with each other). Solar magnetic activity and atmospheric CO2 were both trending upwards over the period, and both stepped up to much higher levels over the second half of the 20th century. These two correlations with temperature change give rise to the two main competing theories of 20th century warming. Was it driven by rapidly increasing human release of CO2, or by the 80 year “grand maximum” of solar activity that began in the early 1920’s? (“Grand minima and maxima of solar activity: new observational constraints,” Usoskin et al. 2007.)

The empirical evidence in favor of the solar explanation is overwhelming. Dozens of peer-reviewed studies have found a very high degree of correlation (.5 to .8) between solar-magnetic activity and global temperature going back many thousands of years (Bond 2001, Neff 2001, Shaviv 2003, Usoskin 2005, and many others listed below). In other words, solar activity “explains,” in the statistical sense, 50 to 80% of past temperature change.

Such a high degree of correlation over such long time periods implies causality, which can only go one way. Global temperature cannot be driving solar activity, so there must be some mechanism by which solar activity is driving or modulating global temperature change. The high degree of correlation also suggests that solar activity is the primary driver of global temperature on every time scale studied (which is pretty much every time scale but the Milankovitch cycle).

In contrast, records of CO2 and temperature reveal no discernable warming effect of CO2. There is a correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature, but with CO2 changes following temperature changes by an average of about 800 years (Caillon 2003), indicating that it is temperature change that is driving atmospheric CO2 change (as it should, since warming oceans are able to hold less CO2). This does not rule out the possibility that CO2 also drives temperature, and in theory a doubling of CO2 should cause about a 1 degree increase in temperature before any feedback effects are accounted, but feedbacks could be negative (dampening rather than amplifying temperature forcings), so there no reason, just from what we know about the greenhouse mechanism, that CO2 has to be a significant player. The one thing we can say is that whatever the warming effect of CO2, it is not detectable in the raw CO2 vs. temperature data.

This is in glaring contrast to solar activity, which lights up like a neon sign in the raw data. Literally dozens of studies finding .5 to .8 degrees of correlation with temperature. So how is it that the IPCC’s current generation of general circulation models start with the assumption that CO2 has done 40 times as much to warm the planet as solar activity since 1750? This is the ratio of AR5’s radiative forcing estimates for variation in CO2 and variation in total solar effects between 1750 and 2010, as listed in [the table of RF estimates in the chapter on human and natural temperature forcing factors]. RF for CO2 is entered as ___ W/m^2 while RF for total solar effects is entered as ___ W/m^2. [I’m not going to quote the actual numbers, but yeah, the ratio is an astounding 40 to 1, up from 14 to 1 in AR4, which listed total solar forcing as 0.12 W/m^2, vs. 1.66 for CO2.]

So the 50% driver of global temperature according to mountains of temperature correlation data is assumed to have 1/40th the warming effect of something whose warming effect is not even discernable in the temperature record. This is on the input side of the GCM’s. The models aren’t using gigaflops of computing power to find that CO2 has that much larger a warming effect. The warming ratio is fixed at the outset. Garbage in, garbage out.

The “how” is very simple. The 40 times greater warming effect of CO2 is achieved by blatant omitted variable fraud. As I will fully document, all of the evidence for a strong solar magnetic driver of climate is simply left out of AR5. Of the many careful empirical studies that show a high correlation between solar activity and climate, only three papers are obliquely referenced in a single sentence of the entire First Order Draft. On [page___, line ____ of the chapter on aerosols and clouds] there is a bare reference to three papers that found unspecified correlations to some climate variables, with no mention of the dramatic magnitude of the correlations, or the scope and repetition of the findings. And that’s it. Not a single other mention in the entire report. A person reading AR5 from cover to cover would come away with not even a hint that for more than ten years a veritable flood of studies have been finding solar activity to explain something on the order of half of all past temperature variation. The omission is virtually complete.

As a result, AR5 misattributes virtually all of the explanatory power of solar-magnetic activity to the correlated CO2 variable. This misattribution can be found both in AR5’s analytical discussions and in its statistical estimations and projections, and the error could not be more consequential. If it is solar-magnetic activity that drives climate then the sun’s recent descent into a state of profound quiescence portends imminent global cooling, possibly rapid and severe, and unlike warming, cooling is actually dangerous and really can feed back on itself in runaway fashion.

Nothing could be more perverse in such a circumstance than to unplug the modern world in a misbegotten jihad against CO2. The IPCC’s omitted variable fraud must stop. AR5’s misattribution of 20th century warming to CO2 must stop. The evidence overwhelmingly supports the solar-magnetic warming theory. The only support for the CO2 theory is the fact that models built on it can achieve a reasonable fit to the last couple centuries of temperature history, but that is only because CO2 is roughly correlated with solar activity over this period, while these models themselves are invalidated by their demonstrable omitted variable fraud. If warming is attributed to solar-magnetic effects at all in accordance with the evidence then the warming that is left to attribute to CO2 becomes utterly benign.

With natural temperature variation almost certainly both substantially larger than CO2 effects, and headed in the cooling direction, the expected external value of CO2 is unambiguously positive. If anything, we should subsidizing and promoting increases in atmospheric CO2, exactly the opposite of the draft report’s opening claim that developments since AR4 “… [summary conclusion about scientists supposedly being more sure than ever (thanks to the absence of any 21st century warming?) that the effects of human activity are the primary climate concern].”

As someone who recognizes the scientific errors in this disastrous report, I can at least make sure that the issue is put properly before the authors of AR5. Thus I am documenting as concisely as possible the solar-magnetic omission and the errors it leads to. The discussion is substantial but I have kept it well under the character limit for a single comment. This comment is being submitted as a top-level comment on AR5 as a whole, and it is being submitted unaltered as a comment on three different sub-chapter headings where the omitted solar-magnetic evidence ought to be taken into account: ____, ____, ____ [a subheading in the paleo-data chapter, a subheading in the chapter on clouds and aerosols, and a subheading in the radiative forcing chapter].

A sample of the omitted evidence

Listed below are a few of the most prominent and compelling studies that have found a strong correlations between solar activity and climate, together with a semi-random collection of similar findings, totaling two dozen citations all together. It would be easy to list two dozen more, but the purpose here is just to show a sample of the omitted evidence, in order to document up-front the existence and validity of it. Included are brief descriptions of the findings for about ten of the studies. None of the observed correlations are reported anywhere in AR5. The first four are the ones I mentioned above:

Excerpt from Bond: “Over the last 12,000 years virtually every centennial time scale increase in drift ice documented in our North Atlantic records was tied to a distinct interval of variable and, overall, reduced solar output.”

Excerpt from Shaviv: “We find that at least 66% of the variance in the paleotemperature trend could be attributed to CRF [Cosmic Ray Flux] variations likely due to solar system passages through the spiral arms of the galaxy.” [Not strictly due to solar activity, but implicating the GCR, or CRF, that solar activity modulates.]

Plenty of anti-CO2 alarmists know about this stuff. Mike Lockwood and Claus Fröhlich, for instance, in their 2007 paper: “Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature” (Proc. R. Soc. A), began by documenting how “[a] number of studies have indicated that solar variations had an effect on preindustrial climate throughout the Holocene.” In support, they cited 17 papers: the Bond and Neff articles from above, plus:

The correlations in most of these papers are not directly to temperature. They are to temperature proxies, some of which have a complex relationship with temperature, like Neff 2001, which found a correlation between solar activity and rainfall. Even so, the correlations tend to be strong, as if the whole gyre is somehow moving in broad synchrony with solar activity.

Some studies do examine correlations between solar activity proxies and direct temperature proxies, like the ratio of Oxygen18 to Oxygen16 in geologic samples. One such study (highlighted in Kirkby 2007) is Mangini et. al. 2005, “Reconstruction of temperature in the Central Alps during the past 2000 yr from a δ18O stalagmite record.”

Excerpt from Mangini: “… a high correlation between δ18O in SPA 12 and D14C (r =0.61). The maxima of δ18O coincide with solar minima (Dalton, Maunder, Sporer, Wolf, as well as with minima at around AD 700, 500 and 300). This correlation indicates that the variability of δ18O is driven by solar changes, in agreement with previous results on Holocene stalagmites from Oman, and from Central Germany.”

Excerpt from Ogurtsov: “Statistical analysis of the carbon and oxygen stable isotope records reveals variations in the periods around 100, 11 and 3 years. A century scale connection between the 13C/12C record and solar activity is most evident.”

Excerpt from Di Rita: “The chronological correspondence between the ages of saltmarsh vegetation reductions and the minimum concentration values of 10Be in the GISP2 ice core supports the hypothesis that important fluctuations in the extent of the salt-marsh in the coastal Tavoliere plain are related to variations of solar activity.”

Raspopov et al, 2011, “Variations in climate parameters at time intervals from hundreds to tens of millions of years in the past and its relation to solar activity,” JASTP.

Excerpt from Raspopov: “Our analysis of 200-year climatic oscillations in modern times and also data of other researchers referred to above suggest that these climatic oscillations can be attributed to solar forcing. The results obtained in our study for climatic variations millions of years ago indicate, in our opinion, that the 200- year solar cycle exerted a strong influence on climate parameters at those time intervals as well.”

Tan et al, 2011, “Climate patterns in north central China during the last 1800 yr and their possible driving force,” Clim. Past.

Excerpt from Tan: “Solar activity may be the dominant force that drove the same-phase variations of the temperature and precipitation in north central China.”

Saltmarshes, precipitation, “oscillations.” It’s all so science-fair. How about something just plain scary?

Excerpt from Solheim: “We find that for the Norwegian local stations investigated that 30-90% of the temperature increase in this period may be attributed to the Sun. For the average of 60 European stations we find ≈ 60% and globally (HadCRUT3) ≈ 50%. The same relations predict a temperature decrease of ≈ 0.9°C globally and 1.1−1.7°C for the Norwegian stations investigated from solar cycle 23 to 24.”

First paleo chapter error: omitting all solar variables besides TSI

The paleo-observations chapter is the right place for the evidence for a solar-magnetic climate driver to be introduced because most of this evidence is obtained from the deposition of cosmogenic isotopes in various paleologic strata: ice cores, geologic cores and tree rings. When solar activity is strong, less galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) is able to penetrate the solar wind and reach earth, making variation in cosmogenic isotopes found in time-indexed strata a proxy for solar activity. But when this chapter does get around to looking at cosmogenic records, it only looks at how they can be used to reconstruct total solar irradiance (TSI). It never even hints at the flood of studies that show a high degree of correlation between solar activity and various paleo proxies for climate and temperature!

This takes place [in the addendum that asks whether the sun is a major climate driver]. This addendum mentions the long-period changes in TSI that go with orbital variation (Milankovitch cycles), a factor which hasn’t changed enough since 1750 to account for any significant amount of the warming since that date. Neither can TSI changes from changes in the sun’s output of electromagnetic radiation be responsible for significant recent warming because, as solar activity jumps dramatically up and down over the roughly 11 year solar cycle, solar output is known to remain remarkably stable, varying only .1 to .2%.

Thus, concludes the addendum, the sun cannot be responsible for any significant amount of the warming since 1750. But it is only able to reach this conclusion by completely omitting any consideration those solar variables other than TSI that could be affecting global temperature. Unlike TSI, solar wind speed and pressure vary considerably over the solar cycle and between solar cycles. So do the Ap index and the F10.7cm radio flux progression, while the GCR that the solar wind modulates (measured by neutron counts at Climax, Oulu and other locations) can vary by a full order of magnitude over the solar cycle. In contrast, TSI varies so little that it is called “the solar constant.” If there is a mechanism by which solar variation is driving global temperature, it is most likely to work through those solar variables that actually vary significantly with solar activity. Yet the discussion in the addendum pretends that these other solar variables do not even exist.

So that’s the first error in the paleo-chapter addendum: pretending to have addressed the range of possible solar effects while studiously neglecting to mention that there are a bunch of solar variables that, unlike TSI, vary tremendously over the solar cycle and might affect our climate in ways that we do not yet understand. We in-effect live inside of the sun’s “atmosphere,” the extended corona created by the sun’s magnetic field and the solar wind. AR5 simply assumes that this solar environment has no effect on global climate, and they do it by rank omission of the relevant variables. The omitted variable problems that result are not an accident. They are omitted variable fraud.

Second paleo-chapter error: the highly irrational assumption that temperature would be driven by the trend in solar activity rather than the level

Perhaps in an effort to justify ignoring all solar variables other than TSI, the paleo-chapter addendum ends with what it presents as a general reason to dismiss the possibility that solar variation made any significant contribution to late 20th century warming by ANY mechanism:

[The statement here it the familiar claim that, because solar activity was not rising over the second half of the 20th century, it cannot possibly be responsible for late 20th century warming. I wrote a series of posts last year documenting the number of anti-CO2 alarmists who make this amazing claim, that it is not the level of forcing that creates warming, but the rate of change in the forcing. See for example, “Solar warming and ocean equilibrium Part 3: Solanki and Schuessler respond.”]

TSI peaks at the high point of the solar cycle just as the other solar variables do, so no matter what solar variable is looked at, it can’t have been the cause of recent warming, because none of these variables showed any upward trend over this period, right? Wrong. That’s like saying you can’t heat a pot of water by turning the flame to maximum and leaving it there, that you have to turn up the flame sloooooowly if you want the water to heat. It is incredible to see something so completely unscientific in AR5, passing as highly vetted science.

And the “flame” did stay on maximum. Again, there was an 80 year “grand maximum” of solar activity starting in the early 1920’s (Usoskin 2007).

[WUWT interjection for Leif and others who deny that there was a 20the century grand maximum of solar activity: if 20th century solar activity was merely “high instead of exceptional” (Muscheler 2007), it makes no difference to the argument here, as I explain in a postscript at the bottom.]

By claiming that solar activity would have had to keep rising in order to cause late 20th century warming, AR5 is in-effect assuming that by the late 70’s the oceans had already equilibrated to whatever temperature forcing effect the 20th century’s high level of solar activity might have. Otherwise the continued high level of solar activity would have caused continued warming.

Claims of rapid ocean equilibration have been made (Schwartz 2007), but they don’t stand up to scrutiny. In order to get his result, Schwartz used an energy balance model with the oceans represented by a single heat sink. That is, he assumed that the whole ocean changed temperature at once! Once you move to a 2 heat sink model where it takes time for heat to transfer from one ocean layer to another (Kirk-Davidoff 2009), rapid temperature adjustment of the upper ocean layer tells us next to nothing about how long it takes for the ocean to equilibrate to a long term forcing. [For an in-depth comparison of one heat-sink and the two heat-sink energy balance models see Part 2 of my ocean equilibration series.]

The paleo-temperature record is typified by multi-century warming and cooling phases, suggesting that equilibration can easily take centuries, making it ludicrous to assume that the warming effect of a grand maximum that began in the 1920’s must have been spent by 1970 or 1980 or by any particular date.

So no, there is no way to save the utterly incompetent argument in the paleo-chapter addendum that a solar driver of temperature can only cause warming when it is on the increase. If solar wind pressure or GCR does in some way drive global temperature, there is every reason to believe that it would have continued to warm the planet for as long as solar activity remained at grand maximum levels. There is no excuse for the IPCC to be omitting these variables, which are much more likely than TSI to be responsible for the high observed degree of correlation between solar activity and climate. For the paleo chapter to be tenable, all of the now massive evidence that there is some mechanism by which solar activity is driving most temperature change must be laid out in full.

Technical note: misattribution is assigned manually in AR5, but the concept is the same as for purely statistical omitted variable fraud

If TSI and the other solar variables all move roughly together, won’t omitting the solar variables other than TSI cause their explanatory power to be attributed to TSI rather than CO2, since they are more closely correlated with TSI than with CO2?

In a purely statistical estimation scheme yes, but the IPCC uses a combination of parameterized elements and estimated elements, and amongst the parameterized elements are the radiative forcings of CO2 and TSI, meaning that their relative warming effects are parameterized as well, with CO2 being assigned 40 times the warming effect of TSI over the 1750 to 2010 period.

This parameterization means that the explanatory power of the omitted solar magnetic variables gets attributed forty parts to CO2 for every one part to TSI. This structure forces the misattribution onto CO2. You can think of it as a manual assignment of the misattribution.

The general concept of the omitted variable remains the same. There is only so much attribution for warming to go around (100%). If attribution is given to the solar-magnetic variables in accordance with the evidence from the historic and paleo records, meaning at least 50%, then there less than 50% that can possibly be attributable to other causes.

Which again brings the scientific competence of IPCC into question. If CO2 has 40 times the warming effect of the 50% driver of global temperature (total solar effects), that makes it what? The 2000% driver of global temperature?

The chapter on aerosols and clouds inverts the scientific method, using theory to dismiss evidence

Where the paleo chapter simply pretends that no solar variable other than TSI exists, the chapter on aerosols and clouds doesn’t have that option. It is tasked to address directly the possibility that variables like the solar wind and GCR could be affecting climate. But this chapter still comes up with a way to avoid mentioning any of the massive evidence that there must be some mechanism by which solar activity is driving climate. Just as it starts to touch on the subject, it jumps instead to examining the tenability of particular theories about the mechanism by which solar activity might drive climate.

This happens right at the beginning of [the section that discusses the possible interplay between cosmic radiation, aerosols and clouds]:

[The quote here is the first two sentences under this sub-chapter heading. The first lists three papers as finding non-specific correlations between cosmogenic isotopes and various climate variables. The second sentence executes an immediate transition to a discussion of the evidence for particular mechanisms by which solar activity might drive global temperature.]

The first sentence of this quote is as close as AR5 comes to making any mention of overwhelming evidence that there is SOME mechanism by which solar activity drives global temperature. The citations suggest some correlations between solar activity and climate, but the strength of the correlations and how well established they are is completely obscured, and that’s it. Bare reference to three papers (author and year) with virtually nothing about what they found. The second sentence effects the transition into looking at the evidence for particular theories of possible mechanisms by which solar activity might effect climate. A short discussion later the evidence for these particular mechanisms is asserted (quite tendentiously) to be “[not strong enough]” for the mechanisms to “[have a significant effect on climate]” (page __, line __). This proclaimed weakness in turn becomes the rationale for omitting the proposed mechanisms from the IPCC’s general circulation models, and hence from the projections that are made with those models.

What do the AR5 draft authors do with the overwhelming evidence that there is SOME mechanism at work that makes solar magnetic the primary driver of global temperature? They don’t like the particular theories offered, but they have to still acknowledge that SOME such mechanism must be at work, don’t they? But readers don’t know about that evidence. It was skipped over via that one sentence of oblique references to a few papers that made unidentified findings, allowing AR5 to continue as if the evidence doesn’t exist. They never mention it again. They never account it in any way. It is GONE from AR5. The authors declare their dissatisfaction with the available theories for how solar activity might drive climate, and use this as an excuse to completely ignore the massive evidence that there is some such mechanism at work.

This is an exact inversion of the scientific method, which says that evidence always trumps theory. The IPCC is throwing away the evidence for a solar-magnetic driver of climate because it isn’t satisfied with the theories that have been proposed to account for it. This is the definition of anti-science: putting theory (or ideology, or anything) over evidence. Evidence has to be the trump card, or its not science. The IPCC is engaged in pure, definitional, anti-science, precisely inverting the scientific method.

It is as if a pre-Newtonian “scientist” were to predict that a rock released into the air will waft away on the breeze because we understand the force that the breeze imparts on the rock but we have no good theory of the mechanism by which heavy objects are pulled to the ground. We should therefore ignore the overwhelming evidence that there is some mechanism that pulls heavy objects to the ground, and until such time as we can identify the mechanism, proceed as if no such mechanism exists. This is what the IPCC is actually doing with the solar-climate evidence. Y’all aren’t scientists. You are actual, definitional, anti-scientists.

More anti-science: the aerosols and clouds chapter repeats the second paleo-chapter error

You know what I’m talking about: that bit about thinking that a climate driver can only cause continued warming if its own level continues to increase. The clouds and aerosols chapter says again that just leaving a proposed climate driver on maximum can’t possibly cause warming (page___, lines ___):

“_____ _____ _____ _____ ____”

And that’s the end of the section, AR5’s punctuation mark on why solar activity and GCR should be dismissed as an explanation for late 20th century warming.

This is anti-scientific in its own way. Scientists are supposed to be smart. They aren’t supposed to think that you have to slowly turn up the flame under a pot of water in order to heat it. You could collect every imbecile in the world together and not a one of them would ever come up with the idea that they have to turn the heat up slowly. It’s beyond stupid. It’s like, insanely stupid. And multiple chapter-writing teams are proclaiming the same nonsense? Fruitcakes.

Okay, I guess that means I’m ready to wrap up. Y’all have taken all these tens of billions in research money and used it perpetrate a fraud. As I have documented above, you have perpetrated the grandest and most blatant example of omitted variable fraud in history, but so far only the skeptic half the world knows it. You still have a shot, before global cooling is an established fact, to make a rapid turn around and save some shred of your reputations. But if AR5 comes out insisting that CO2 is a dominant warming influence just as global cooling is proving that the dominant climate driver is our now-quiet sun, then you all are finished on the spot. You’ll still have your filthy lucre, but the tap is going to turn off, and your reputations will be destroyed forever.

Can you imagine a worse juxtaposition? Still waging war on CO2 as the sun is already proving that CO2 is entirely beneficial? And this is what the evidence says is going to happen, all of that evidence that you have been so studiously omitting. I’m eager for your embarrassment, but I would much rather see you save yourselves, so that the needed policy reversals can some that much sooner. The anti-CO2 policies that your fraudulent “science” has supported are right now destroying the world economy. You idiots are killing our future. Please wake up and try to save your own reputations before your lunatic anti-science ruins us all.

End of review

“Omitted variable fraud” is the more fundamental critique

It is common for those who are swayed by the evidence for solar-climate driver to frame their protest against the IPCC’s dismissal of the evidence by protesting the short shrift the IPCC gives to the theories of how those effects might work. Here, for instance, is Tim Ball’s 2008 critique of AR4:

…they studiously avoided any discussion of the clear relationship between sunspot activity and temperature. They claimed there was no mechanism to explain the correlation so it could not be included, but that is incorrect. A very valid mechanism known as the Cosmic Theory (Svensmark and Calder, “The Chilling Stars”) has been in the literature with increasing detail since 1991. The date is important because IPCC claimed it was excluded because it was not published in time to meet their cut off date for consideration.

In other words, AR4 did exactly the same thing that AR5 is doing. They used the supposed lack of a sufficient theory for how a solar magnetic driver worked as an excuse not to present the overwhelming evidence that some such mechanism is a potent driver of global climate (a ruse that I documented in submitted comments on the Second Order draft of AR4, and TAR pulled the same trick as well.)

Ball’s response—that there actually is a pretty good theory—is perfectly correct, but it skips past the deeper point: that there can never be any excuse for “studiously [avoiding] any discussion of the clear relationship between sunspot activity and temperature.” The “omitted variable fraud” critique directly exposes and attacks this excuse making. Empirical evidence, the raw data, is supposed to be the ultimate arbiter. If any excuse is used to shunt the evidence aside, it’s no longer science.

We also know the consequences of this fraudulent anti-science. Omission of any variable with known explanatory power (regardless of whether the mechanism is understood) creates misattribution of the same magnitude. It’s a first order mistake.

In contrast, giving short shrift to the GCR-cloud theory is a lesser problem. So long as the IPCC’s predictive scheme attributes recent warming to solar activity in accordance with past patterns it isn’t a big deal whether a particular solar-temperature mechanism is modeled or not. At least the known explanatory variables are not being omitted and we are down to second order errors instead of first order errors.

Note that it is not necessary to invoke any theory. Predictions of future solar activity, for instance, are not based on physical models, but are purely a projection of past patterns, and this is sufficient to avoid first order error. Avoid the omitted variable fraud, account the known explanatory power of the solar-magnetic variables in any reasonable way, and big mistakes are avoided.

For the fraudsters, big mistakes are the whole point. Only with big mistakes can our eco-leftist “scientists” wage their war against industrial capitalism. Only big mistakes can give mainstream-left politicians the vast energy taxes that they eye as a treasure trove and allow them to channel hundreds of billions of dollars in wind and solar subsidies to their friends and backers.

But it’s an easy fraud to expose. Pretty much everyone who has ever taken a first course in statistics is familiar with the omitted variable problem. That is every undergraduate economics major, every business major, every science major, and most other social science majors. Right now, most of these people believe it when they are told that they can’t check the facts for themselves, that they just have to trust (or not trust) the credentialed climate scientists. But it is not true. Not only can they check the facts for themselves, but it is trivially easy.

All they need to do is scan a selection of the many empirical findings that solar-magnetic activity “explains” in the statistical sense something like half of past temperature change, then observe that all solar magnetic variables are in fact omitted from the IPCC models. It’s right there the RF table for each area report, where total solar effects are parameterized as having some tiny fraction of the warming effect of CO2. Then bingo. They know that powerful solar-warming effects are being misattributed to the coincidentally correlated CO2. They have checked the facts for themselves, at which point the voices of authority insisting that they cannot check the facts for themselves instantly become the Wizard of Oz, ordering them to ignore the man behind the curtain. Not even trusting little Dorothy fell for that.

Fundamental and accessible. That’s why I have trying to push the “omitted variable fraud” critique for manyyears. Anthony has a bigger bullhorn than I have had access to in the past, so maybe it will get out there this time!

If Leif is right that sunspot counts since 1945 should be reduced 20%, it does not alter the above analysis in any significant way

If solar activity from 1945 to 2000 was merely “high instead of exceptional” (Muscheler 2007, whose cosmogenic proxies for solar activity extend through 2001), the narrative here is not significantly altered. As my review reiterates, you don’t have to keep turning the flame up under a pot of water to cause warming. Coming out of the Maunder Minimum/ Little Ice Age, if what the paleo-data says is the primary driver of global temperature remained at a high setting for most of a couple of centuries, that should cause continued warming. To actually argue that solar forcing has to continue rising in order to cause continued warming (the IPCC just asserts it) you’d have to argue that oceans had already equilibrated to the forcing, but there is no evidence for that, while the history of planetary temperature suggests that equilibration can take several centuries.

It is true that some of the strongest correlations between solar activity and temperature have short lags, on the order of ten years, but rapid responses to short term changes in solar-magnetic activity do not militate against longer term responses to longer term forcings. On the contrary, short term responsiveness implies longer term responsiveness, just as the rapid response of daytime temperatures to the rising sun implies that the longer term increase in insolation as the seasons change towards summer should cause seasonal temperature change (which of course it does).

For present purposes, it doesn’t matter whether solar activity quickly jumped up to high levels after Maunder and stayed mostly at those levels until the end of the 20th century (with the notable exceptions of the Dalton Minimum and the turn of the 19th century lull), or whether solar activity over the second half of the 20th century really did ascend to the highest levels seen since 9000 BC (Usoskin). As far as we know, either scenario could easily account for the modest amount of warming in question.

That’s an unexceptional .7° C from 1600 to the 1961-90 average according to Moberg 2005 , or .5° between 1750 to 1961-90. That 1961-90 temperature average is the HadCRUT3 zero point. HadCRUT3 reached a peak of .548 in 1998 and has fallen a couple of tenths since, so altogether there was a peak of about a 1° increase over the IPCC’s 260 year study period (now down to about .8°) which is nothing unusual in the ups and downs of global temperature.

There is no reason to think that the sun could only be responsible for this unexceptional temperature increase if there had been 50 years of the highest solar activity since 9000 BC. Of course the IPCC thinks that any steady level of solar activity over the second half of the 20th century rules out a solar explanation for the small amount of warming over that period on grounds that the level of solar activity didn’t keep going up to even more extreme levels, but they’re just a bunch of fruitcake anti-scientists.

Submitted review contains one inaccuracy that is corrected in the review posted above

My submitted review claimed that the only reference in the First Order Draft to the vast evidence for a solar-climate driver comes in a single sentence that makes an oblique reference to a single research paper. In the corrected review above, that becomes a single sentence making oblique reference to three research papers.

Two of the papers only look at solar-climate correlations over the second half of the 20th century and hence are inherently unable to draw strong conclusions. I guess I was thinking that the only “real” citation was to the survey paper that actually addresses the paleo-data. But those details are irrelevant to the point I was trying to make—that a reader of AR5 is given no hint of what is in any these papers—and no clue that numerous studies point to solar activity as the primary driver of global temperature. The submitted review quotes the full sentence, so it isn’t hiding anything, but it isn’t fully accurate.

So that’s the price of procrastination. It was just before the submission deadline and I had a reunion dinner to rush off to so I was not able to vet as thoroughly as I would have liked. Still, this is the only actual screw-up in my submitted review: it isn’t one oblique reference to a single paper, but one sentence obliquely referencing three papers. With the draft report unavailable to WUWT readers I don’t want to put forward any mischaracterizations, so I made the correction and am footnoting it here.

The posting here also fixes some typos, adds links to some of the cited papers, adds some formatting that was unavailable on our Excel submission form, and touches up the presentation in a few spots.

There are in all likelihood multiple omitted variables, or mis-attributed variables. I’d include both stratospheric aerosols and tropospheric aerosols in that category.

Otherwise, I agree. To argue that because measured warming (or other climate effect) isn’t caused by A, B or C, it is therefore caused by D (GHGs) is a logical fallacy that pervades scientific papers and GW discussions.

Where is the direct evidence that GHGs cause the observed warming. In truth there is very little direct evidence.

In short: while the 11 year sun spot cycles may not have an influence over centennial climate evolution, the wider “grand maximum – grand minimum” has a long lasting influence on the Earth magnetic field that shields more or less cosmic rays.
Cloud formation is directly influenced by cosmic rays, although a quantitative relationship remains to be established (does somebody knows if one is available?).
A simple model calculation shows that for each % increase of cloudiness (the ratio of Earth surface covered by clouds) the surface temperature will increase by approx. 0.5 °C, quite a high positive sensitivity.
But cloudiness is one on the least precisely measured climate variables. It impacts not only on temperature but also on rainfalls, another interesting topic.

A good example of stealth by design. The IPCC and their followers on the gravy train use TSI as a blocking device that would be employed by any supporting sophist enlisted in the fallacy of AGW.

This topic will be the Achilles heal that eventually wears down the rhetoric of man made warming Armageddon. Alec mentions several times the solar/magnetic variables, which of course includes the massive UV variations of 30-100% that have major consequences on atmospheric teleconnections, which cannot be dismissed.

Yes there is the Waldmeier factor that needs to be realized when looking at SSN, but there is no doubt solar activity has been on the upward slope since 1900, this is part of the normal powerwave or Gleissberg cycle that occurs on a regular basis, but importantly this cycle is tempered by solar grand minima of differing strength. To ignore this wave is ludicrous.

I am reminded of the Press Complaints Code of Conduct for editors where public defense for publishing material is given as:

1. The public interest includes, but is not confined to:
i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety.
ii) Protecting public health and safety.
iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation.

1. Is there serious impropriety … clearly yes

2. Does it affect public health and safety. 2.3million people in the UK will die over the next century due to winter cold. Estimates suggest a quarter of Scotland’s population died in the 1690s during the last Maunder minimum. 2.3million is as close to a holocaust. If the denial of solar causality of climate leads to even a fraction of these deaths, those involved will be responsible for some of the biggest man-slaughters in history.

3. The public are clearly being misled by the statements from the IPCC.

In science, you cannot pick and choose the evidence you consider. You may explain why you reject certain evidence or certain interpretations, but you must give the reader the information to be able to follow that logic themselves … because in science, anyone can be wrong. Except the f[snip] IPCC.

The IPCC 5th report is going to repeat the same shenanigans we saw in AR4. The IPCC cannot justify ignoring the sun based on that they don’t understand the amplification mechanism, but at the same time claim that CO2 has massive positive feedbacks without having a clue how it does.

My knowledge is zero on this, so my opinion is meaningless. However, I do find it uncomfortable that the IPCC etc say the suns influencew is so small. Taking it as gospel that we have had a strong solar maximum through the end of the 20th century, and the fact that the sun is weakening and temps have leveled off, is it wise to dismiss it?

“It is as if a pre-Newtonian “scientist” were to predict that a rock released into the air will waft away on the breeze because we understand the force that the breeze imparts on the rock but we have no good theory of the mechanism by which heavy objects are pulled to the ground. We should therefore ignore the overwhelming evidence that there is some mechanism that pulls heavy objects to the ground, and until such time as we can identify the mechanism, proceed as if no such mechanism exists. This is what the IPCC is actually doing with the solar-climate evidence. Y’all aren’t scientists. You are actual, definitional, anti-scientists.”

Thanks for these clear words and the clear reasoning. I have no illusion as to whether the IPCC will react, but hopefully the IPCC as a whole, and its lackays at the PIK, CRU, GISS and NCAR can be isolated and neutralized so that its Hexenhammer 5.0 will fail to damage the world’s economies further.

How nice to see some attempt at discussing science. But, there is a lot wrong here.

> These two correlations with temperature change give rise to the two main competing theories

No. That seems to be a common misconception, but the theories start with the physical processes, not with the correlations.

> “grand maximum” of solar activity that began in the early 1920′s? (“Grand minima and maxima of solar activity: new observational constraints,” Usoskin et al. 2007.)

Usoskin says nothing about climate, and presents no figures that allow you to see what has happened in the 20th C – the scale shown is too large. And for our purposes there is nothing new there, because the 20th C measurements were known before.

Which brings in the second obvious point: although you’ve ref’ed a few new papers, there isn’t actually anything new here. All you’ve written could have been – and I suspect, has been – written about IPCC AR4. So while the AR5 FOD might be an exciting “newsy” peg to hang this story on, it would have been better written in the context of AR4, which is conveniently publically available.

And since you haven’t actually addressed any of the attribution arguments for 20th C change they gave there, all this is besides the point.

> prominent and compelling studies that have found a strong correlations between solar activity and climate… Bond et al. 2001, “Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene,

Day is warmer than night. Winter is colder than summer. The ice age cycles are locked to astronomical forcing. No-one doubts that solar forcing affects climate, in general. So listing any number of studies that agree with this gets you nowhere. You need to actually address *recent* change.

If I understand you correctly, you are claiming that even if solar activity [sunspots, TSI, magnetic activity, comic rays] has been constant since 1700, the rise in temperature since the Little Ice Age would still be the result of this constant solar activity. You may wish to consult the paper by Schrijver et al http://www.leif.org/EOS/2011GL046658.pdf “[22] Therefore, we argue that the best estimate of the magnetic flux threading the solar surface during the deepest Maunder Minimum phases appears to be provided by direct measurement in 2008–2009.”

The fact that models have been more or less correct for the past 200 years is that they were made to fit that time so prove AGW. The mind set of scientists who do this show what a dream world they live in. The warming since 1750 is due to recovery from the LIA which was completely natural.

The Temperature/CO2 causation is certainly driven by temperature but there can be no intermediate feedbacks from CO2 to increase temperature, unless you believe in time travel. CO2 is the innocent bystander leapt on by the climate police because its there.

Good critique but I wonder why an economist was asked to review a climate chapter. It only goes to show that ‘The Delinquent Teenager…….’ book is correct with its reporting, and well worth a read.

That is excellent advice to the IPCC. Even so there is a lot more to the sun/climate relationship.

The main thing is that to understand how the Sun regulates the Earth’s climate dynamics, it is necessary to (1) examine all of the ways: electromagnetic radiation; matter; electromagnetic field; gravitational field; the shape of the Sun; and the topological structure of the heiosphere; (2) the interaction effects between these and between how they affect climate dynamics; and (3) use methods of quantitative analysis that are appropriate for non-linear dynamics.

I analysed a lot of papers about relationships between the Sun and climate dynamics. This can be found in:

ABSTRACT
This paper introduces this thesis:
The Sun-Earth system is electromagnetically, magneto-hydrodynamically and
gravitationally coupled, dominated by significant non-linear, non-stationary
interactions, which vary over time and throughout the three-dimensional structure
of the Earth, its atmosphere and oceans. The essential elements of the Sun-Earth
system are the solar dynamo, the heliosphere, the lunisolar tides, the Earth’s inner
and outer cores, mantle, crust, magnetosphere, oceans and atmosphere. The Sun-
Earth system is non-ergodic (i.e. characterised by continuous change, complexity,
disorder, improbability, spontaneity, connectivity and the unexpected). Climate
dynamics, therefore, are non-ergodic, with highly variable climatological features
at any one time. A theoretical framework for considering the role of the Sun in
relation to the Earth’s climate dynamics is outlined and ways in which the Sun
affects climate reviewed. The forcing sources (independent variables) that
influence climate processes (dependent variables) are analysed. This theoretical
framework shows clearly the interaction effects between and amongst the two
classes of variables. These seem to have the greatest effect on climate dynamics.
Climate processes are interconnected and oscillating, yielding variable
periodicities. Solar processes, especially when interacting, amplify or dampen
these periodicities producing distinctive climatic cycles. As solar and climate
processes are non-linear, non-stationary and non-ergodic, appropriate analytic
methodologies are necessary to reveal satisfactorily solar/climate relationships.

“You need to actually address *recent* change.” Sounds to me as if Mr. Connolly is reverting back to the “Hockey Stick” as the obvious answer is “What about the medieval warm period”? That period cannot easily be categorised at “recent”.
I am not able to evaluate Alex Rawls’ response to AR5 draft, but I have a suspicion that considering the persons involved in drafting the document, this is essentially an application for the extension of financial support for climate research. Think of what would happen if suddenly the sun was considered a major climate determinant? The funding would dry up. That would be untenable for a lot of climate researchers. They would have to think of something else to do.

A good and interesting article, but I guess few will be surprised by the approach adopted by the IPCC given its political nature. If the IPCC was more scientific, given the ever increasing evidence and suspicions that there may be little if any further rise in temperatures for the next 20 to 30 years, one would have expected it to be more circumspect and to suggest that other natural drivers may have some role to play. Adopting the political stance ‘that it is CO2 stupid’ may hasten its downfall since it may look very foolish in just 6 to 10 years time. .

I have been pointing out for a long time that it is one of the greatest PR victories that Joe Public has the impression that the temperature record shows over whelming correlation with the levels of CO2 when in fact there is no correlation whether in the recent past during the instrument record, or on a geological time scale. I am pleased to see someone of note make that point.

The basic physics of CO2 as a GHG provides that there must always be an increase in temperature when concentrations of CO2 increase. Likewise, if CO2 levels fall, then temperature must always fall. This is the basic properties of CO2 as a GHG.

(i) a steady rise in temps until about 1880 in circumstances where there was no discernable increase in CO2.
(ii) Then there was a fall in temps until about 1918 in circumstances where there was no discernable decrease in CO2.
(iii) Between 1919 and 1942, there was an increase in temperatures in circumstances where there was no discernable increase in CO2.
(iv) Between 1942 and 1980, there was a fall in temperatures in circumstances where there was increase in CO2. THIS IS ANTI CORRELATION. Between 1981 and 1998, there was an increase in temperatures in circumstances where there was an increase in CO2, however, it is noteworthy that the rise in temperatures during this period when CO2 is said to be a driver is no greater than the period between 1919 and 1942 when there was no CO2 driven temperature rise. Between 1999 and 2011, there has been no increase in temperature whilst CO2 levels have increased.

Looking at this record, no reasonable person looking at the instrument record would conclude that there is a correlation between CO2 and temperature, still less that CO2 drives temperatures. If nothing else, the anti correlation between 1942 and 1980 when temperatures fell despite a rise in CO2 levels coupled with the fact that the rate of temperature increase between 1981 and 1999 when CO2 levels were increasing is no greater than the rate of temperature increase between 1919 and 1942 when there was no significant rise in CO2 levels runs counter to the claimed premise that CO2 drives temperature.

The author suggests that models do a reasonable job at hindcasting over the last couple of centuries. This is not so. They only do so because of the introduction of fudge factors the appropriateness for which is highly moot.

Again, if one considers the geological record, again there is no correlations. There are periods when temperatures remain broadly static not withstanding fluctuations in CO2 levels. More significantly there are periods of anti correlation when temperatures are seen to rise and yet CO2 levels are falling, and also periods when temperatures are seen to be falling whilst CO2 levels a re rising. If this anti correlation were not problem enough to the extent that there is broad similarities between temperature and CO2, it appears that CO2 lags temperature and is therefore not a driver but rather a response.
Against such background, it is incredible that there is so much traction for the simple correlation in the real world that CO2 drives temperatures.

In my opinion, this all got off the ground because some bright spark though it appropriate to fit a straight linear trend line through the instrument period temperature record. In my opinion, no mathematician would have thought it appropriate to fit a straight line through that record and this error has hidden what appears to be natural cycular temperature variations.

Because of the simple physics of CO2 as a GHG, every year when there is a rise in CO2 and no corresponding rise in temperature an explanation is required. If the explanation is temperature rises in fits and starts then that is a concession that natural variation dominates over CO2 as the primary driver of temperature.

Whilst I would be very surprised if the sun does not have a significant role in temperature fluctuations, presently, I have seen no convincing evidence supporting its role still less explaining it. In my opinion, we have still a lot to be learnt and understood.

No. That seems to be a common misconception, but the theories start with the physical processes, not with the correlations.”

I didn’t read past that William to know the rest of your comment was rhetoric. While you are here wanting to talk about the science, how about you put your monika on the ‘backradiation’ theory here and now, so we can discuss it.

Alec Rawls post is seriously important because of the implications for policy already implemented on the basis of “fraudulent” scientific evidence. The fraud is already perpetrated in earlier reports and these should be carefully analysed to attribute the crime to those involved. The magnitude of the financial implications let alone the misery caused to the poor by Emissions Trading Schemes and Cap and Trade are mind boggling. The perpetrators must be held to account. The IPCC must be defunded immediately and the UNFCCC closed down.

It is not as if the perpetrators both political and scientific are unintelligent, they are both politically and academically astute. However they have been caught out again in mixing ideology with the fraudulent use of science. The shame of this on scientists goes further than Peter Gliecks mind explosion this is akin to Justice Mahon’s description of the Air New Zealand management evidence in the Erebus disaster enquiry “an orchestrated litany of lies”. Perhaps an “orchestrated litany of omission” is an updated version more apt in this circumstance.

Governments must now step in and bring those responsible to account, there is adequate legislation in most of the western world to put a stop to this fraud. They must also bring down the UN generated bureaucracy that continues to fuel the IPCC UNFCCC and Kyoto etc.

Governments must re think every policy implementation based on the fraud of CO2 induced global warming, climate change call it what you will. The reason is clear a government policy based on a fraud is a fraud against the people governed.

I have to agree with William M. Connolley . The important question is what caused the 1970 to 2000 measured warming.

An analysis that focused on this period would make a more compelling argument.

The GCR theory is plausible, although I favour tropospheric aerosol reductions as the main cause of the 1970-2000 warming. But then GCRs and aerosols seed clouds in similar ways. So what seems to evidence for one may be evidence for the other.

Dismissing Solar Activity as a Climate Driver because TSI didn’t increase constantly over the late 20th C is just plain daft & unscientific. I use the central heating analogy (forgive me if I have said this before), but when you come home to a cold house at night with no heating on, you go & turn it on to get warm. It may be -1°C outside & only say 1-2°C inside, depending upon the thermal efficiency of the house constructions & insulation, the efficiency of the boiler, etc it could take anything up to an hour before the house temp reaches a comfortable temperature let alone an optimum 20°C. So a fairly constant heat output takes time to raise temperature, it isn’t instant which is what the IPCC seem to want to fall back on which is illogical!

There is actually no correlation between CO2 and temperature except the latest warm AMO cycle, onto which are the models fitted, failing both before and after. CO2 and GISP2 core data as a good proxy for NH does not fit at all. We saw just a limited natural variation, nothing more.

To do science properly it is required, if possible to identify direct evidence from verifiable data, and when such evidence is found then it should be extended to the more distant past by using various proxies.
I have looked into data since 1880 to 2011, and there is no evidence that the sunspot periodicity affects global temperature (NASA-GISS, HadCRU & NOAA average) to any significant degree.http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SpecComp.htm
It is important to make a point that sunspot cycle as expressed by the SSN is not comprehensive metric for the total of the solar output, hence there appear to be strong indication that temperature changes and the solar activity are in a certain degree of synchronisation, but the mechanism is still eluding the mainstream science, while some of us on the fringes have (or think to have) a pretty good idea what that mechanism may be.http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NVa.htm

This posting suggests some powerful evidence contradicts the “mainstream” AGW view, as reported by an expert reviewer, i.e., an insider. It also touches on recently-reported scandals about gross data misrepresentation, ommission, and cherry-picking (something which both warmists and skeptics regularly accuse the opposite camp of doing).

The essence of this post should be presented to major newspapers and blogs, then robustly debated on its scientific merits (by scientists, but for the general public to view). The matter is too important to sweep under the rug. It matters not that the author of the post is not a ‘climate scientist’ per se, but rather an expert in statistics – he refers to studies by climate scientists.

Please, no head counts. Nobody cares how many oppose his points: the only important thing is whether he is right or wrong, whether the arguments are backed by data and logic.

Leif want’s to calibrate sunspotnumber, but how to calbrate it? How to calibrate solarwind from times when we did not measure it. The only right way to do it is calibtate it with solar proxydata. Because sunspotnumbers wont tell everything. We have proxy of cosmic rays and other ways to find real solar activity so it’s better to make them to correlate with each other.

Alec says
Such a high degree of correlation over such long time periods implies causality, which can only go one way. Global temperature cannot be driving solar activity, so there must be some mechanism by which solar activity is driving or modulating global temperature change
————
This is a logic fail. If two separate things are trending together it’s does not follow that one causes the other.

Example: let’s say yellow shoes become fashionable and the number of people wearing yellow shoes trends up. But it’s also the start of summer so temperatures are also trending up. Does this mean wearing yellow shoes makes the air warmer?

If you answer yes go and sit in the corner.

Another grumble I have is the use of term “solar activity”. This is potentially misleading due to its vagueness and I have the suspicion deliberately so.

Sorry, I am a realist. The feedback from politicians’ desire to tax the very air we breath via the funding of predetermined science that supports their agenda overwhelms any forcing from rational argument, whether weak or, as in this case, strong.

A really excellent article from Alex Rawls. It is a pleasure to read, now written properly, some of the critique I tried to persuade Nigel Calder to make when the AR4 was written.

However, I have one major criticism to level at this review, and I hope Alex reads this. I find the foillowing in this paper.

“and in theory a doubling of CO2 should cause about a 1 degree increase in temperature before any feedback effects are accounted.”

This mistake is made over and over again. There is a belief that this “no-feedback” climate sensitivity of CO2, yielding a 1 C rise in surface temperature, is based on sound science. It is not. No-feedback climate sensitivity is a hypothetical, meaningless number, and the way it is estimated assumes that the “structure of the atmosphere remains unaltered”, or in other words, the estimation can be made by only looking at radiation effects. This assumption has never been justified, and is, I believe, just plain wrong. The lapse rate changes under the effects of GHGs.

The possibility remains that, regardless of the demolition of the IPCC’s pseudoscience, the watermelons in charge of public policy will carry on regardless. Do we have any way of judging whether government scientific advisors – in the ministries – are open to scientific argument?

I’ll send a hard copy of this post to the UK’s ‘finest’ in the hope that they’ll react with a loud, “Holy mackerel! It’s the sun, not CO2! And it’s getting colder. Stop the windmill programme!” If they’re members of the Hockey Team, they’ll chuckle darkly and mutter, “Science, schmience, we’ll carry on decarbonising the economy come what may.”

Seems to have been a fair amount of misunderstanding of that. The change you need to explain is this; the last 100 years or so. Pretending that isn’t real consigns you to la-la land, where nothing you say will have any impact on science, because you’re too far off base.

> The basic physics of CO2 as a GHG provides that there must always be an increase in temperature when concentrations of CO2 increase

Shows an acceptance of basic GHE physics which puts you above 50% (at least) of the people here, but wrong. The basic physics shows that increasing CO2 increases the radiative forcing. That doesn’t translate into a monotonic temperature increase in the real world, because of natural variability – we expect the day-to-day and year-to-year temperature to exhibit fluctuations on top of the forced trend (err, as do this who want to attribute the trend to solar forcing).

> Between 1919 and 1942, there was an increase in temperatures in circumstances where there was no discernable increase in CO2.

> Between 1942 and 1980, there was a fall in temperatures in circumstances where there was increase in CO2. THIS IS ANTI CORRELATION

Um, yes. How clever of you to notice. I wonder if the IPCC noticed? Well, yes of course they did. You need to actually read what they have written and argue against it, not just write your stuff in a vacuum.

Incidentally, the idea that the IPCC ignores solar forcing is trivially disprovable by just reading the reports.

An excellent piece. It perfectly illustrates the depths these non-scientists are willing to go to in order to defend their AGW religion.
It is bad enough to see science debased in this way but, as the author mentioned, this fraud threatens the future wellbeing of humanity. Here in the UK, aged pensioners who cannot pay inflated electricity bills have died due to the freezing temperatures. Fortunately there’s a good chance that Chris Huhne will end up behind bars. But it won’t be for his real crimes.
I think that any politician that does not practice due diligence (as Steve McIntyre often says) in the field of climate change/energy policy is guilty of criminal neglect. And that includes you, David Cameron.
Chris

Interesting commentary and it seems quite convincing but I am just an engineer and it was a lot to digest. Mr Rawls seem to think the IPCC is a scientific body – it is not. It is an international panel on climate change that was created on the assumption that CO2 is causing global warming. That was its starting point – it was not created to prove that climate change is occurring as a result of burning fossil fuels. So all of its publications are going to be presented to support the notion that CO2 causes global warming otherwise the panel has no reason to exist. The nasty thing about all this is that the general public and politicians still think the IPCC is a scientific body carefully trying to prove if CO2 is mankind’s enemy when in fact it assumes that it is. That is why any offer to IPCC hanger-ons to debate or seriously discuss the science is never accepted. I do not know of any high profile SCIENTIFIC organisation that has been given the task of independently establishing if adding CO2 to the atmosphere is net good or net bad for the planet and humankind. The only work being done in this regard is by people on the gravy train, who have no option but to reach certain conclusions, and by other sturdy individuals using whatever means that they can muster to just find some truth. AR5 must be audited and challenged by challenging the IPCC to demonstate its independent scientific standing, which it cannot do of course because it is not a scientific institution. Mr Rawl’s efforts are to be applauded. It is a very important point that the IPCC is totally confused on the basic calculus regarding things that are rate dependent and things that have no time component. i.e. it takes time to heat the water (and, scarily, it takes time to cool) but the expansion is instantaneous with respect to temperature change.

Re the variables, there are so many at play yet IPCC have historically given weight to just one for the obvious reason that the only reason they exist is because a few scientists suggested CO2 would cause catastrophic destruction to the world and they wanted the glory of saving it.

William Connolley… for years kept dissenting views on global warming out of Wikipedia, allowing only those that promoted the view that global warming represented a threat to mankind. As a result, Wikipedia became a leading source of global warming propaganda, with Connolley its chief propagandist.

His career as a global warming propagandist has now been stopped, following a unanimous verdict that came down today through an arbitration proceeding conducted by Wikipedia. In the decision, a slap-down for the once-powerful Connolley by his peers, he has been barred from participating in any article, discussion or forum dealing with global warming. In addition, because he rewrote biographies of scientists and others he disagreed with, to either belittle their accomplishments or make them appear to be frauds, Wikipedia barred him — again unanimously — from editing biographies of those in the climate change field.[source]

Why are all the dishonest folks on the alarmist side? Schneider, Mann, Connolley, Jones, Gleick, the list goes on and on. The answer seems to be, at least in part, that the planet is not cooperating with their scare stories. Nothing unusual is occurring. None of their predictions of disaster have happened. To the contrary, more CO2 is verifiably greening the planet. It seems these dishonest people have to deceive the public in order to keep their baseless scare alive, rather than admitting the truth: they were simply wrong.

The extremely good correlation between temperature patterns and solar/astronomical patterns has been extensively proven in my numerous papers. At least 40-70% of the warming observed since 1900 can be associated to solar activity in one way or in another.
The empirical models and harmonic models based on solar/astronomical cycles explain climate variability far better than any CO2 based IPCC model : see the references below and here. Actually, in my papers it is expensively proven that the IPCC GCM models (such as the GIS modelE, for example and all the others) do not get any of the patterns that can be identified in the data. Those models just produce some noise around an upward trend driven by anthropogenic emissions.

If the IPCC has ignored the relevant literature pointing toward the existence of a major solar/astronomical driver of climate change they have committed “omitted variable fraud” and severely misinterpreted the available scientific literature. It is evident that simply dismissing the empirical evidences on the basis that clear physical mechanisms are not understood yet nor included in the models is a very weak argument based on extreme scientific reductionism.

Of course they omit natural phenomenona, they do so because they’re not charged with taking natural into account.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to assess the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of human induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for mitigation and adaptation.”

The fundamental construction of the UNIPCC didn’t not include to take into account and report on natural change nor positive results from any type of climate change.

As per usual any UN body, it seems, omitts reality to fit their hypothesis to their needs. It is evident in UNIPCC as well as the current debate of whether or not UN should control this here internet as Russia and China wants to happen.

I would like to throw a spanner in the works here. I believe climate is probably controlled by gravity, solar influence and water ….period. I actually am beginning even to doubt Pielkes Sr land use land effects on TC. The fact is land or rock is probably “perceived” as the same as far as the atmosphere is concerned affected only by major geographical disturbances such as mountain ranges which affect wind direction etc. Basically if you covered all land as it is currently with concrete there would be theoretically no change in global mean temperatures over time, as it is 100% controlled by tthree variables cited above BTW sea (ie water covers most of earths surface etc…) hope you get it LOL

Let me see if I have this straight. The same people who are telling us that the reason we haven’t seen as much heat from CO2 as their models suggest is because it takes the oceans decades to warm. Are telling us that the sun can’t be playing a role because there is no thermal lag in the oceans???

“How nice to see some attempt at discussing science. But, there is a lot wrong here.”

> These two correlations with temperature change give rise to the two main competing theories

“No. That seems to be a common misconception, but the theories start with the physical processes, not with the correlations.”

Without the “global warming” part, you’d have nothing. And the global warming part is what is correlated to co2 increases. Take your rhetoric elsewhere, Connolley, you can’t control the content here. The physical processes are not fully known or understood. The explanations (theories) may begin with limited understanding of Earth’s complex physical processes, but the correlations are what “gave rise” to them.

William M. Connolley said::
“No-one doubts that solar forcing affects climate, in general. So listing any number of studies that agree with this gets you nowhere. You need to actually address *recent* change.”

Oh. Recent change such as that starting “mid 20th century”, to go with a claim that “we can’t think of anything else, so it must be CO2 doing it. ”

@LazyTeenager, we’re permitted to use common sense. The sun influences the earth, the earth doesn’t influence the sun. I suspect that known fact is the basis for the author’s reasoning.

William Connelley says CO2 did rise between 1920 and 1940. Yep his chart shows it rose, about 8ppm from 300. That’s a 2.7 % rise. IF sensitivity is 4C that will account for 0.1C. The rise over that period was close to 4C. What about the other 3C?

Hey, William M. Connelley, or you the same William M. Connelley that used to be a Wiki administrator until Wiki management stripped you of that authority on the grounds that you repeatedly abused your administrator position at Wikipedia to bias climate change-related articles to reflect your global warming activism?

How can you people hope to say anything intelligent about IPCC, when you are so completely ignorant of what it says?

> The physical processes are not fully known or understood

But you shouldn’t measure the lack of knowledge by your own. Most of the processes are indeed well known and understood. Some important ones (clouds, or contrails) aren’t so well. The response to that isn’t to throw your hands up in the air and say “oh! we know nothing”.

> “we can’t think of anything else, so it must be CO2 doing it. ”

Again, this is just ignorance. Contrary to what the post author has asserted, IPCC does indeed exhaustively consider other possible forcings. If you actually looked at the report, you’d know that.

> on the grounds that you repeatedly abused your administrator position at Wikipedia to bias climate change-related articles to reflect your global warming activism

@Brent Hargreaves says: February 22, 2012 at 4:34 am
“Science, schmience, we’ll carry on decarbonising the economy come what may.”
This is so close to a response I had from John Prescott at a ‘symposium’ about 18 months ago that I wonder if you were in the same audience!

Alex Rawls will just be given the flick by the Thermageddonists, as an obvious shill for BigSol. But little chip by little chip, the edifice of the IPCC will topple over.

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is R. Pachauri, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Pity it won’t have the slightest effect; AR5 will continue the junk of AR4 except it will be an even greater doom merchant in order to keep the CAGW flag flying.

As I (and Henry G, above) keep saying, everything our side does misses the point so we need another methodolgy. I don’t have the answer but am sure it lies in first getting at the hearts & minds of legislators directly, those who use CAGW and “carbon” taxes to further their big state ambitions. Only then might the reality start to dawn on those who are CAGW lead and govern us thusly.

Why? what caused the MWP?, what is causing the current non-increases in temps? There is no logic to concentrate on any small scale period when we (i.e. the IPCC) are wanting to predict future long term temps!! That’s like doing a long journey with many miles in a traffic jam, and many miles at motorway speeds, and then assuming an average speed for the journey. Not only is it plain wrong, but predicting the next journey will be meaningless because the various factors will likely be very different when you do that journey.
About the only benefit of short term analysis is if it can be seen that definate factors caused definate changes – but projecting them to the future, without knowledge of the underlying natural changes – is pointless.
I despise the fact that the primary warmist arguments are based on the ‘recent’ measurements – it doesn’t matter – if the (likely) palaeohistory of the climate shows significant variation, the Primary objective is to separate our so called AGW signal from the natural one(including its variations). This can only be done over long timescales – and currently, I do not see that as being at all possible with a measly few decades of decent data. (I won’t bother to mention the lack of understanding of all the variables, as that should be a ‘given’ with the climate system!)

So far, after evaluating thye daily results of 22 weather stations the score on my pool table for global warming is as follows:
MAXIMA: rising at a speed of 0.0382 degrees C per annum
MEANS : increasing at a speed of 0.0137 degrees C per annum
MINIMA: creeping up at 0.0056 degrees C per annum
HUMIDITY: decreasing at a rate of -0.02% RH per annum

The latest tables show that, over the past 4 decades, the rates of increase of temperatures on earth i.e. maxima, means (=average temperatures) and minima have risen at a ratio of about 7:3:1. Remember: these are the summaries of actual measured results from a number of weather stations all around the world….No junk science. No hypothesis. Every black figure on the tables is coming from a separate file of figures. Obviously I am able to provide these files of every black figure on the table.

As all the balls now lie on my table, surely, anyone must be able to understand that it was the rise of maximum temperatures (that occur during the day) that caused the average temperature and minima on earth to rise? This implies clearly that the observed warming over past 4 decades was largely due to natural causes. Either the sun shone a bit brighter or there were less clouds. There are different theories on that. Looking at the differences between the results from the northern hemisphere(NH) and the southern hemisphere (SH), what we see is happening from my dataset is that more (solar) heat went into the SH oceans and is taken away by water currents and/or weather systems to the NH. That is why the NH is warming and that is why the SH does not warm.
Another interesting aspect is that a correlation can be picked up if you compare the results in my tables with that of the leaf area index shown in the world chart here:https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/24/the-earths-biosphere-is-booming-data-suggests-that-co2-is-the-cause-part-2/

In the red areas, where we find earth is blooming, and more greening, you will note from the results in the tables that some of the extra heat coming in (the increase in maxima) is picked up and trapped by the increasing vegetation. In the blue areas, where substantial de-forestation has been going on, you will find mean temperatures and minima declining or staying unchanged, even though maxima are rising. So, it seems if you want the earth to be greener, the natural consequence is that it will also get a bit warmer

Yes, it is ignorance. But the ignorance is entirely Connolley’s. It is the Argumentum ad Ignorantium fallacy: “Since I can’t think of any other cause for rising temperatures, then it must be due to CO2.”

That kind of ignorance presupposes that we know all there is to know about what drives global temperatures. But of course, we do not know it all. The planet has warmed along exatly the same trend line since the 1600’s, whether CO2 was low or high. That shows conclusively that CO2 has little if any effect on temperature.

Connolley can bask in his ignorant fallacies, but here at the internet’s Best Science site, the great majority of us know better.

Seems to have been a fair amount of misunderstanding of that. The change you need to explain is this; the last 100 years or so. Pretending that isn’t real consigns you to la-la land, where nothing you say will have any impact on science, because you’re too far off base.

—

Folks… The “this” he refers to above is a wikipedia plot of the infamous NASA GISS temperature “anomaly” plot (heh)!! GISS – where they can’t even document their GCMs!

Here’s a puzzle for everyone…please list in detail all of the steps required to get the plot referred to above. How much raw data is manipulated? Infilled? Guessed? And also pleased read the Hansen paper from which the “algorithm” was purportedly derived…it’s the one where they smear global temperature anomalies by permitting influences up to 1000 km away (heh).

Wonderful diversionary tactic from Connolley. As Steve McIntyre has it, “always keep your eyes on what their hands are doing”.
The point that Rawls was making — which Connolley chose to ignore — is that there has been an increasing number of papers, which the IPCC has, apparently deliberately, neglected to give any weight to, that attribute much of the recent warming to aspects of solar influence other than TSI. I’m not qualified to say whether he’s right or wrong but I think I am qualified to say that if the IPCC is omitting valid research (and valid does not mean “something the IPCC agrees with”) then they are being, in Rawls’ words, “anti-scientific”.
Rawls also appears to say that one effect of their behaviour is to assume that CO2 has 40 times the influence of the sun on earth’s climate (which would appear to an ignoramus like me to be counter-intuitive — and that’s putting it mildly) and program their models accordingly.
Even I know that if you program a computer to say the sun rises in the west then it will tell you that the sun rises in the west.
I’m not dead keen on the “leftist conspiracy” theory he posits but the more one reads on the whole subject of climate change the more one is driven into that particular corner!

Great post Alex. Can it be taken a little further, though? If a large part of the temp increase can be attributed to solar variables but their impact has been, effectively, lumped onto CO2, then what would the models say if CO2 forcing were reduced by an appropriate amount? I’d imagine your idea would be pretty irresistable if the models then predicted, sorry, projected, the temperature anomaly with a much greater degree of accuracy.

Once again Mr. William “Bojangles” Connolley takes out his dancing shoes and attempts to distract us from the real science behind global changes in climate. Dancing around the offal used as input to the MAGIC COMPUTE MACHINES! Cleanup on aisle 4!!!!

… the solar reconstruction of Lean et al. (1995) concluded that the near-surface temperature response to solar forcing over 1960 to 1999 is much smaller than the response to greenhouse gases (Jones et al., 2003).

The response from the iPCC is correct based on their mission statement. The IPCC only investigates the risks of climate change caused by human activity only, not solar causes or any thing else.

Wikipedia says “Its mission is to provide comprehensive scientific assessments of current scientific, technical and socio-economic information worldwide about the risk of climate change caused by human activity, its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences, and possible options for adapting to these consequences or mitigating the effects.”

Hey! Someone is reading this stuff, excellent. Its a little clearer with a fuller quote: “In addition, a combined analysis of the response at the surface and through the depth of the atmosphere using HadCM3 and the solar reconstruction of Lean et al. (1995) …” This is describing a GCM study, based on the Lean ’95 reconstruction, that will (I’m guessing) have been extended to 1999. So it is likely that both dates are correctly written.

Alec Rawls, this is a very interesting post, thank you. Also some of the comments posted in response.

The design of incremental policy also explains the use of ‘omitted variables’. The recent focus on ‘evidence-based’ policy in most spheres of government to develop and report, and the competition between party policies makes use of the omission approach.

The problem has been that evidence-based policy does not equate with fact-based.
Testing one variable or several, and omitting the obvious is used by some researchers. In my observation of some decades, some researchers omitted variables so as to establish a controlling expertise in the field, control publishing and reference sources, and to directly inform policy and expenditure.

I had experience in Indigenous health, education and employment under incremental policies. The Children, over several generations, led horrific lives. Much of this was directly due to the poor data and reporting that informed and sustained the architecture of incremental policy in health service, education delivery and criminal justice.

Results for these children are still appalling if not gross. The evidence was controlled by a cabal of researchers, data methodologies were not transparent and reporting was aggregated. Upon disaggregating the data, it was found, in cases to be poorly collected, poorly designed, biased and also at times outright distortion. In one case I found the data had been made up and reported.

The mainstream’s “uniform 0.1K” solar-terrestrial-climate narrative is strictly inadmissibility under the data.

This is not going away. This is a seminal, fundamental finding that forces not only conceptual correction but whole paradigm shift (since no one’s conception of solar-terrestrial-climate relations was correct).

Attempts to maintain the current “uniform 0.1K” solar-terrestrial-climate narrative will turn out to be futile (the functional numeracy deficiencies &/or deception of any proponents can be made nakedly clear by capable parties with sufficient time & resources on the basis of absolute logic), so if deviant forces are looking for a way around this, I can suggest the easiest avenue: Remove the pattern from LOD & AAM data. That could be done in a few minutes (by someone who intuitively understands the complex cross-scale morphology of the data). Then it would just be a matter of defending the changes administratively (e.g. via stone wall). Defense will be more sustainable in the long run if the functional numeracy of the general population is watered down by further sabotage of mathematics education.

I strongly suggest that everyone regularly save copies of AAM & EOP data so that data manipulation can be tracked rigorously.

“But you shouldn’t measure the lack of knowledge by your own. Most of the processes are indeed well known and understood. Some important ones (clouds, or contrails) aren’t so well. The response to that isn’t to throw your hands up in the air and say “oh! we know nothing”.”

Your response seems to be that you know that most of the processes are well known and understood. Still, without a temperature increase correlation, you have nothing. What you claim is bunk, empty and useless rhetoric.

JJThoms says:
February 22, 2012 at 5:00 am
O2 and N2 do not radiate IR in significant power so where does this radiation come from at night where the background is at Ultra long wave (7K)”

a. Clouds. Score: 100%

But lets not get lost amongst the trees of greenhouse. Disprove this.

The uniformed distribution of heat is the force of pressure caused by gravity and the enhancement of the atmosphere is set by it. Moreover, dynamism controls the uniform distribution of temperature not a ‘backradiation’ greenhouse effect, whatever is the dynamic state of a planets particles.

There is no sensible average temperature enhancements associated with actual increases in actual power emitted from a planets surface, which necessarily require a atmospheric radiative effect, from average temperature enhancements without any change in actual power emitted.

Dynamism maintains the uniform temperature distribution of a planets heat where gravity does not allow differences in temperature distribution.

> Rawls was making — which Connolley chose to ignore — is that there has been an increasing number of papers, which the IPCC has, apparently deliberately, neglected to give any weight to, that attribute much of the recent warming to aspects of solar influence other than TSI

Not as far as I can see. Rawls says very little about the recent warming – a point that I didn’t ignore, it was one I specifically raised as a flaw in Rawls analysis. His “recent papers” don’t either (only the last one, which hasn’t been published. If there are really so many good papers supporting his viewpoint, why does he need to include an unpublished paper in the list?).

Well now we are just waiting truthfully and reliable unbiased comments from P Gleick J salinger M Mann and G Smith as well. You know the guys who handles the “truth” and “intergity” of climate scince. I wonder what way you should relate the “guilt by association” between science and these guys? No option turns out in benefit of either science or these guys!

“That the IPCC addresses other causes is obvious to anyone who bothers to even skim it”

Typically, Connolley sidesteps the fact that blaming CO2 for [non-existent] climate disruption is the argumentum ad ignorantium fallacy. The IPCC uses a fake veneer of ‘science’ to promote its agenda of wealth redistribution from the savings of Americans and Western taxpayers, to dictatorships endemic to the UN in order to buy their votes.

Connolley’s deceptive narrative, pretending that any of this is a sincere attempt to advance science, is directly contradicted by the IPCC’s Ottmar Edenhofer: “One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore”.

So who should we believe? Connolley, who was slapped down for his dishonest propaganda? Or the frank admission of the IPCC Co-Chair, stating that the phony demonization of “carbon” is simply a ploy to get the UN’s money grubbing fingers into the wallets of Western taxpayers?

There appears to be no difference between the broken moral compass of Gleick and Connolley. They both employ dishonesty to advance their totalitarian agenda.

… the solar reconstruction of Lean et al. (1995) concluded that the near-surface temperature response to solar forcing over 1960 to 1999 is much smaller than the response to greenhouse gases (Jones et al., 2003).

It seems to me either 1995 or 1999 is a typo.
*******************************************************************
You’ve misquoted. That helps no one.

“In addition, a combined analysis of the response at the surface and through the depth of the atmosphere using HadCM3 and the solar reconstruction of Lean et al. (1995) concluded that the near-surface temperature response to solar forcing over 1960 to 1999 is much smaller than the response to greenhouse gases (Jones et al., 2003).”

How remarkable that there should be two vocal AGW activists with the name William M. Connolley, one sanctioned by the Wikipedia arbitration board and stripped of his admin privileges because of misconduct, and the other, apparently posting here today, who claims he is not that same person.

The response from the iPCC is correct based on their mission statement. The IPCC only investigates the risks of climate change caused by human activity only, not solar causes or any thing else.

Wikipedia says “Its mission is to provide comprehensive scientific assessments of current scientific, technical and socio-economic information worldwide about the risk of climate change caused by human activity, its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences, and possible options for adapting to these consequences or mitigating the effects.”
——————————————————————————
Well spotted, Klem. The whole premise of the IPCC is a tautology. It is perfectly legitimate for them to exclude things like solar from their deliberations.

It is hard to believe how a body which provides the answer before even framing the question can be regarded as having anything to do with science.

> You sure do. And many of us has more than a clue as to the bias of the language, choice of references and so on in some of the articles.

I doubt it. I’ve asked several times for examples of such (in other threads) and people always back off (though I wouldn’t want to derail this thread with more wiki stuff).

> Your response seems to be that you know that most of the processes are well known and understood. Still, without a temperature increase correlation, you have nothing

You really really don’t understand, do you? It isn’t based on correlation, it is based on the underlying physical processes. If you want to understand how the attribution analysis is done, you’ll need to actually read it.

“…Solar total and ultraviolet (UV) irradiances are reconstructed annually from 1610 to the present. This epoch includes the Maunder Minimum of anomalously low solar activity (circa 1645–1715) and the subsequent increase to the high levels of the present Modern Maximum. In this reconstruction, the Schwabe (11‐year) irradiance cycle and a longer term variability component are determined separately, based on contemporary solar and stellar monitoring. The correlation of reconstructed solar irradiance and Northern Hemisphere (NH) surface temperature is 0.86 in the pre‐industrial period from 1610 to 1800, implying a predominant solar influence. Extending this correlation to the present suggests that solar forcing may have contributed about half of the observed 0.55°C surface warming since 1860 and one third of the warming since 1970…”

Isn’t this period (since 1860) the same period that Connolley wants us to use for the “recent” warming?

William M. Connolley says:
February 22, 2012 at 6:26 am
……..
The IPCC authors do not understand natural variability !
The IPCC report: Relationship between the NAO and the AMO is non–stationary, i.e. during the negative phase of the AMO, the North Atlantic SST is strongly correlated with the NAO index. In contrast, the NAO index is only weakly correlated with the North Atlantic SST during the AMO positive phase.
You can see here that there is a high degree of correlation between the NAO and the AMO through the period of the data availability, as shown here:http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/theAMO-NAO.htm
or see the full analysis of the relationship here:http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/64/12/35/PDF/NorthAtlanticOscillations-I.pdf

This is a logic fail. If two separate things are trending together it’s does not follow that one causes the other.

If the trend (correlation) persists over a sufficiently long period with a sufficiently high correlation then it does indeed mean there is a causal relationship between whatever there is a correlation between.

William Connely says
…”Not as far as I can see. Rawls says very little about the recent warming – a point that I didn’t ignore, it was one I specifically raised as a flaw in Rawls analysis. His “recent papers” don’t either (only the last one, which hasn’t been published. If there are really so many good papers supporting his viewpoint, why does he need to include an unpublished paper in the list?)”
=========================================
A curious comment, lets turn the coin over. If the IPCC is so convinced about the case for CAGW, then why does it include so much information from non peer reviewed and non journal published advocacy sources like “Green peace” and the “WWF”?

Regarding the recent history there is several logical thoughts for you to consider. Place a large pot of water on a stove. Turn on a gas burner. Every 30 sec, turn the burner up and down. Now notice how the water continues to warm, regardless of the burner being turned down. Why? Clearly the water in the pot has not yet reached equalibrium with the heat being produced below it.

Now consider that although solar activity peaked some years ago, it stayed at a very high level until recently. Further recognise that the oceans are a very large pot, and some of the linked papers demonstrate that the ocean can take many many decades of increased TSI to reach equalibrium. The ocean is a very large pot.

Now further consider the changes in the earths albedo, which over the period of high solar activity (albeit just a little below the peak) actualy decreased. This means that more sunshine reached the surface. For the last decade this trend has began to reverse, and albedo is starting to rise and the atmosphere as a whole is beginning to cool.

We have mechanism and we have observation, all within the scientific literature, all ignored by your poltical organization, the IPCC.

William M. Connolley says:
“You need to actually address *recent* change.”
The correlation between solar activity and global precipitation and between CET -vs- METO is good until they all start loosing correlation in 1980.

Obviously that probably flies over your head, so I will try to explain. Global precipitation is a proxy for climate. That is because much of the heat at the surface is lost through evaporation. That means that we expect changes in global precipitation to be matched by changes in global temperature. Likewise we expect temperature series to see matched rises and falls, and we certainly do not expect to see an equivalent increasing lack of correlation from a fixed point in time (1980s).

Now, as is your nature, you will immediately assume “it’s yet further proof of global warming”. However what we see in the rainfall climate proxy is no change. This proxy is showing that there is no global increase. In contrast, the temperature measurements show a global increase.

Now, you probably won’t have a clue what I’m talking about when I say that it is easier to measure rainfall accurately than temperature, but I’m an expert of temperature measurement so I know what I’m talking about. And the fact that three separate series (solar activity, global rainfall and different temperature series) all show a growing lack of correlation with temperature, strongly suggests that the problem is with one temperature series and not with three other independent variables (all of which happen to diverge at the same time?)

In other words, something very odd has happened to a number of climate measurements/proxies around 1980 … and to suggest that a lack of correlation after than time proves that it never was correlated is to my mind fraudulent if you know the facts or blatant incompetence if it is your job to know the facts

I am going to offer a completely non-scientific theory as to why solar activity is deemphasized. Since the sun’s activity is beyond the control of humans, it is scary and avoided. Plus i think that most of the people in this field are secularists and thus have no faith or believe that there is a God who controls all things. That makes them even more uncomfortable. I am a retired engineer who has worked 40+ years on many complex avionics systems so i am closely associated with science. But when we talk about the cosmos, i think we are biased in our thinking. Just my humble opinion.

William Connolley… for years kept dissenting views on global warming out of Wikipedia, allowing only those that promoted the view that global warming represented a threat to mankind. As a result, Wikipedia became a leading source of global warming propaganda, with Connolley its chief propagandist.

His career as a global warming propagandist has now been stopped, following a unanimous verdict that came down today through an arbitration proceeding conducted by Wikipedia. In the decision, a slap-down for the once-powerful Connolley by his peers, he has been barred from participating in any article, discussion or forum dealing with global warming. In addition, because he rewrote biographies of scientists and others he disagreed with, to either belittle their accomplishments or make them appear to be frauds, Wikipedia barred him — again unanimously — from editing biographies of those in the climate change field.

———————————–
If this is true and I see that name has posted earlier on this thread, he should be barred from here. Anyone with this persona has nothing to add to our discussions here at WUWT. I’d like to see someone from the ‘AGW delusion sect’ bat here for them but not this guy. Not someone whose been barred from Wiki for the reasons cited. We booted Emmanuel for life for being boring and repetitive bringing up his Iron Sun idea. Connolley actions are far more serious.

Being wrong is one thing. Being Connelly is both: that and something else. It’s the latter that qualifies him for the Boot. Boot Connelly for life from here!!!! …………………………………….. Please.

William, the basic problem is that current models all assume that 1 W/m2 change in CO2 capturing of IR has the same effect as 1 W/m2 change of the sun’s TSI. Except for some wiggle in “efficacy” (+/- 10%). There are several reasons why that is wrong. The main reason is the difference in effect: CO2 has it largest effect in the lower troposphere and heats the upper ocean layer with only a fraction of a mm. Solar has its main effects partly in the lower stratosphere, where it influences ozone formation/depletion, temperature and poleward flows, including the jet stream positions and therefore clouds and rain patterns. And it heats the upper ocean layer much deeper.

The influence of human aerosols is another point: in my opinion largely overestimated in the models and doesn’t explain the current standstill: while aerosol (SO2) emissions increased until 1970-1980, a lot of measures were taken in the Western world, which shows huge reductions, at the same time that SE Asia increased its output. Since 2000, there is no global increase in SO2 emissions anymore, while CO2 increases at record levels, but temperature doesn’t. Thus the aerosols as scapegoat for the lack of temperature increase, lacks some physical base…

Connolley’s deceptive narrative, pretending that any of this is a sincere attempt to advance science, is directly contradicted by the IPCC’s Ottmar Edenhofer: “One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore”.
So who should we believe? Connolley, who was slapped down for his dishonest propaganda? Or the frank admission of the IPCC Co-Chair, stating that the phony demonization of “carbon” is simply a ploy to get the UN’s money grubbing fingers into the wallets of Western taxpayers?
———————————————————-
International Climate Policy Vs. (International) Environmental Policy.

> current models all assume that 1 W/m2 change in CO2 capturing of IR has the same effect as 1 W/m2 change of the sun’s TSI. Except for some wiggle in “efficacy” (+/- 10%). There are several reasons why that is wrong. The main reason is the difference in effect: CO2 has it largest effect in the lower troposphere and heats the upper ocean layer with only a fraction of a mm. Solar has its main effects partly in the lower stratosphere

No, not really. The models include radiative physics. Changes in solar, in the model, changes the TOA solar, and exactly where it get absorbed is calculated, not assumed. Again, exactly where the CO2 causes radiative forcing is calculated, not assumed.

You cite Stott et al., but their proposal is that “Here a new attribution method is applied that does not have a systematic bias against weak signals.” – as I read it, that is a statistical property or weak signals; but I haven’t read it carefully, please feel free to quote some more to support your argument.

I note that you, too, are implicitly dismissing the post author’s argument that IPCC has ignored solar forcing; the Stott paper is (as you’d expect) referenced by IPCC.

The post author states: “Of the many careful empirical studies that show a high correlation between solar activity and climate, only three papers are obliquely referenced in a single sentence of the entire First Order Draft. ” I haven’t read the FOD, but do you agree that this description couldn’t possibly be applied to AR4, which deals extensively with solar forcing? If so, how do you explain the author’s apparent ignorance of the AR4?

The fact that Connelly has been reduced to bringing his fallacious arguments here is as good an indication as anything that he and his ilk are desperate scrambling now. People no longer look to the places where he used to have sway as they have become aware of the lies, and are increasingly looking to places such as this for the truth — a place where he has no influence and can only flail about pitifully — alone and isolated.

William Connolley… for years kept dissenting views on global warming out of Wikipedia, allowing only those that promoted the view that global warming represented a threat to mankind. As a result, Wikipedia became a leading source of global warming propaganda, with Connolley its chief propagandist.

His career as a global warming propagandist has now been stopped, following a unanimous verdict that came down today through an arbitration proceeding conducted by Wikipedia. In the decision, a slap-down for the once-powerful Connolley by his peers, he has been barred from participating in any article, discussion or forum dealing with global warming. In addition, because he rewrote biographies of scientists and others he disagreed with, to either belittle their accomplishments or make them appear to be frauds, Wikipedia barred him — again unanimously — from editing biographies of those in the climate change field.

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Boot Connelly off here for life. His actions go before him. If this is the same twit from Wiki: boot him off! It’s good that someone, or anyone, bats for the AGW here but not Connelly.
We booted Emmanuel so and so off here for life for being repetitive and boring about his Iron Sun. Connelly’s actions at Wiki, if true, are far more aggregious.

“Connolley and Schneider say that if the public had looked directly at the peer-reviewed scientific papers, and not at the popular media coverage, they would not have found any basis for a global-cooling scare.”

Oh the ironing! (sic)

Now the question becomes; can Connolley bring himself to replace just that one word?

You know Bill, try replacing the word ‘cooling’ with ‘warming’ and see if that sentence makes just as much sense.

I’ll give you a hint; There are many real scientists who say it makes more sense than your original. Those scientists are frequent subjects of scorn these days by the members of ‘the team’. Let me know and I’ll provide you a list.

This is the very same ‘team’ that colluded to make the impression to the main stream media that ‘we know with certainty that there is significant warming, it is caused by human activity, it is going to be catastrophic, there something we need to do about it, right now and here’s the plan . . .’ (further hint; Try to guess which parts of that sentence have nothing to do with science.) That same team rose to prominence, fame and fortune based not on scientific pronouncements, but in effect by crying ‘the sky is falling’. They pilloried any who disagreed and used their posts and offices as fiefdoms. They decided who would succeed in academia, who’s career needed to be ended, what projects should get funding, what data was acceptable, how to use their posts as a source of largess and to profit personally all under the guise of science.

Bill; it’s becoming disturbing to a lot of people on the outside that those on the inside of this clique cannot see that. The excuses and tortured logic are no longer fooling people, even with the help of the media.

Prepare to be shipwrecked, Bill, along with Mann, Jones, Hansen, et. al. You want to go down with the ship? Fine. You were told.

Because of the teams efforts (they had accomplices), we’ve spent that last decades preparing for a problem that doesn’t exist as advertised in a way that has left us ill suited to the actual problems at hand. We need more energy, not less. Energy could allow us to adapt, either way. Maybe if we’d studied the climate, rather than practicing politics, pronouncing our control over it while condemning those who dared to question the assertions, just maybe we’d have seen this coming. Maybe. The Eddy minimum is very likely to be the shoal upon which your ship will be broken, Bill. It’s here. Too bad we spent our time studying trace elements and redacting data instead of looking at what the data was actually saying.

During the last minimum there were less than a billion people on earth, most of them living an agrarian existence. Today there are 7 billion people on earth, most living in cities with no means to support themselves if agriculture fails. Given knowledge, time and proper prioritization, perhaps we could have been prepared. Instead we have windmills, carbon credits and coal powered cars. Oh, and a UN body masquerading as a scientific body. Thanks, Bill, for being part of that team.

Yours is a false church Bill, not science. Galileo would recognize your dogma and indulgences in an instant.

mooseotto says:
February 22, 2012 at 7:35 am
I am going to offer a completely non-scientific theory as to why solar activity is deemphasized. Since the sun’s activity is beyond the control of humans, it is scary and avoided. Plus i think that most of the people in this field are secularists and thus have no faith or believe that there is a God who controls all –things. That makes them even more uncomfortable. I am a retired engineer who has worked 40+ years on many complex avionics systems so i am closely associated with science. But when we talk about the cosmos, i think we are biased in our thinking. Just my humble opinion.
——————————————————–
Solar threads appear regularly. Go back into the Archives, if you are interested, and read them. The solar debate is in a ‘mystery force x’ standoff where a prominent expert on all things solar maintains the Sun is just on and is constant and that pertubations on earth in temperature, etc. are affected by something else irregardless of the Sun. Others disagree, and so, they agree to disagree, hence, ‘mystery force x’. Nicola Scarfetta agrees to disagree and Leif Svaalgard disagrees entirely with Nicola. It makes fascinating reading. Thats my take on it anyway.

Philip Bradley says:
February 22, 2012 at 7:35 am
“The core prediction of the AGW crowd is CO2 (or more vaguely GHGs) caused the 1970-2000 measured warming. Ignoring that this wasn’t a prediction in large part because it occured after the fact.”

Well, except they don’t call it a prediction, as they are keen to point out that they cannot make predictions with their computers, only projections. See IPCC AR4 where this is written down.

The warming from 1910-1940 had the same slope as the warming from 1970-2000. (*)

“Therefore, explaining or not some warming or cooling prior to this period is of no relevance to a critique of the IPCC’s position of GHGs caused the post 1970s warming.”

So what you are saying is that the explanations and models and assumed physics of the IPCC are only valid after 1970. That’s what I thought as well. That’s why I asked “Did the physics change”.

If temperature and solar magnetic / cosmic ray reconstructions UP TO 1970 (before the laws of physics were magically changed, as we have recognized) indicate a high correlation of solar-magnetic activity and temperature, we can take that as a strong hint that a causation exists, and that this causation is still existing, as there is no obvious reason to assume that a rising CO2 level does anything to it.

And that is the omitted variable.

(*) James Hansen, of course, does his best to distort this well-known fact with ongoing, unjustifiable adjustments. But I digress.

Jessie: …evidence-based policy does not equate with fact-based.
Those of us in education have to suffer with an even lower standard: research-based. Teaching so simple a subject as elementary reading to a typical classroom population has so many uncontrolled variables that this much ballyhooed requirement should be a source of amusement. Yet people take it seriously. Science is fun, but teaching remains an art.

“It is as if a pre-Newtonian “scientist” were to predict that a rock released into the air will waft away on the breeze because we understand the force that the breeze imparts on the rock but we have no good theory of the mechanism by which heavy objects are pulled to the ground.” ….”An excellent review, but that bit is priceless.”

That’s actually very similar to Aristotle’s theory of motion. The Greeks understood that the ‘natural’ state of an object was to remain at rest, and that things move if a force is applied, but they had no concept of the Newtonian ‘or keep moving at a uniform speed’ addition. So they had difficulty explaining why an arrow, or a rock, should keep moving along for a while after leaving a bow (or a hand).

Aristotle suggested that the object in motion pushes air out of the way, which then swings back behind the object, giving it a push as it does so. Not a bad conjecture for an age before the Conservation of Energy law. And since the Greeks were not interested in experimental confirmation (that had to wait until Roger Bacon) that was the way dynamics were taught in university up to the 1600s…

Philip Bradley says:
February 22, 2012 at 7:14 am
“If the trend (correlation) persists over a sufficiently long period with a sufficiently high correlation then it does indeed mean there is a causal relationship between whatever there is a correlation between.”

Ha, ha, so this is what passes for “science” among AGW extremists. :-)

Kudos to William Connely for coming here and suffering the predictable flack. He is focusing us on the real issues.

It’s like inviting an unrepentant serial paedophile into a school board meeting to discuss child safety. Are you completely unaware of the man’s history sir? It’s akin to saying that perhaps we were too hard on Dr Mengele as he just might have been onto something. Good heavens. There comes a point where it matters not what he is saying, when the totality of his crimes are taken into account. He still denies that he did anything wrong while propagandist in chief at Wikipedia. That alone disqualifies him from taking any credit for the arguments of those he still maliciously seeks to destroy.

William M. Connolley: Were you not just banned from editing at wiki? It seems to be the only effective method of limiting your disinformation campaign. If you are stymied at wiki, WUWT is a good location for your rehabilitation, but you test our patience. A little reduction in your hubris will go a long way in ensuring a productive time here. Otherwise, I would suggest, you find out where Peter Gleick is hanging out, these days, and join your counterpart there. You are both cut from the same cloth, and demonstrate, the same “end justifies the means” rational. Such psychopaths represent a clear and present danger to society, and always have. Gleick will soon be behind bars… What about you? GK

Call me a realist. But it will probably be the solar research group trying to get money from the GHG group that will eventually undermine the GHG narrative. Right now many solar scientists are happy to work in their small group of scientists….but there will be some who desire the rock-star life that climate scientists have enjoyed and they will try to build a new scare and money will shift and GHG will slowly fade away. No admissions of being wrong, just longer periods with no mention.

3) The TSI curve doesn’t account for the oceanic response to increased insolation caused by cloud albedo reduction. The decrease in tropical cloud cover (where insolation is most effective in warming the ocean) measured by the ISCCP from 1979-1998 could account for much of the additional warming if Roy Spencer’s estimates are near the mark. Although this is counted into the ‘amplification factor’ in the analysis, again, possible non-linearity isn’t considered and greater variation in U.V. with its possible effects on Ozone, marine biota and thus cloud nucleation are not considered.”

BTW Connely, my previous post David says: February 22, 2012 at 7:28 am, said nothing not said better (just less succintly) in the main article above by Alec Rawls where he directly pre- answered your questions about recent climate changes post the 20th C solar high. Apparently you, like Gleick, do not read something before you condem it. So please read the post before commenting on it so you look less like a Gleick parrot. After reading the part about recent T, including the links to several papers, then comment on the flaws you see within those peer reviewed assertions.

Given such exceptional correlation between temperatures and cosmic rays in the past requires causation.

Past temperature variations of 1-3 degrees locally and synchronism at multiple locations all over the globe prove the IPCC narrative of only 0.1 degree global variation wrong by at least an order of magnitude.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. The UN General Assembly endorsed the action by WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC.

The IPCC is a scientific body. It reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. It does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters. . . . .

. . . Because of its scientific and intergovernmental nature, the IPCC embodies a unique opportunity to provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers. By endorsing the IPCC reports, governments acknowledge the authority of their scientific content. The work of the organization is therefore policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive. ”

I think they’d know. They don’t say anything about only studying Anthropogenic warming. They claim to study the science around climate and climate change. Of course they also claim that they don’t make policy endorsements. Pachuri should read that.

In the mean time, you should look for sources other than Wikipedia. Especially on climate issues it is remarkably inaccurate and unreliable.

Philip Bradley:
>> If the trend (correlation) persists over a sufficiently long period with a
>> sufficiently high correlation then it does indeed mean there is a causal
>> relationship between whatever there is a correlation between.

Not if there is a third factor influencing both the other observables.
(And I am not claiming that is the case here.)

William, how on earth can you make the claim that the IPCC isn’t convinced of CAGW?

This;

“# Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
# Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (>90%) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.
# Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized, although the likely amount of temperature and sea level rise varies greatly depending on the fossil intensity of human activity during the next century (pages 13 and 18).[46]”

is from a wikipedia article you yourself edited as recently as January 28, 2012. The source cited is the IPCC summary for policy makers. I think you are familiar with it.

What are you doing, apart from insulting people and pretending facts aren’t facts? Do you understand the difference between true and false anymore?

Connolley
How nice to see some attempt at discussing science. But, there is a lot wrong here.

> These two correlations with temperature change give rise to the two main competing theories

No. That seems to be a common misconception, but the theories start with the physical processes, not with the correlations.

Astley:
I would be interested in your or your cohorts’ answers to these questions.

Those promoting the extreme AGW paradigm appear to selectively ignore and filter research and data. It is necessary to have a logical/scientific explanation for all observations. The logical process and fundamental rules is similar to criminal scene investigation. What does the evidence show? It is not appropriate or logical to ignore observations or filter observations to promote a specific hypothesis.

This graph shows past Dansgaard-Oesgher or Bond cycles. Note there are cycles in the paleoclimatic record of warming followed by cooling of high latitude Northern regions (Gerald Bond has able to track 23 of these cycles through the Holocene interglacial and into the last glacial cycle). In the 20th century there was also warming of high latitude Northern regions. The past warming and cooling cycles all correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes. There is no correlation with atmospheric CO2 changes. There is no correlation to changes in the North Atlantic drift current and these cycles. Correlation and/or the lack of correlation is a fundamental issue that must be explained by the hypothesis.

What is your or the Realclimate or the AR4 explanation of the past warming and cooling cycles? What caused the warming followed by cooling? Magic wand? Why is there again and again correlation of the warming and cooling cycles with large changes in cosmogenic isotopes? (Changes in cosmogenic isotopes are caused by changes in the solar heliosphere or changes in the geomagnetic field.)

There appears to some sort of spooky filtering mechanism that distorts and blocks the research related to solar modulation of planetary clouds by electroscavenging (Solar wind bursts. There is more than one mechanism by which solar changes modulate planetary cloud cover.) from reaching the IPCC produced documents or the Realclimate threads on solar modulation of planetary clouds.

Based on the below graph that shows cycles of warming followed by cooling some of which are abrupt cooling periods (there is another mechanism that is also solar driven that is causing the abrupt cooling cycles such as the Younger Dryas or the past interglacial terminations) and the fact that currently the magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots is decaying linearly and the sun will soon no longer be capable of producing sunspots what do you think will happen next? What is the lesson of the past telling us?

(See figure 3 from Richard Alley’s paper that is copied in the above link. Excerpt from the above link.)

Fig.3. The upper panel shows the air temperature at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, reconstructed by Alley (2000) from GISP2 ice core data. The time scale shows years before modern time, which is shown at the right hand side of the diagram. The rapid temperature rise to the left indicate the final part of the even more pronounced temperature increase following the last ice age. The temperature scale at the right hand side of the upper panel suggests a very approximate comparison with the global average temperature (see comment below). The GISP2 record ends around 1855, and the red dotted line indicate the approximate temperature increase since then. The small reddish bar in the lower right indicate the extension of the longest global temperature record (since 1850), based on meteorological observations (HadCRUT3). The lower panel shows the past atmospheric CO2 content, as found from the EPICA Dome C Ice Core in the Antarctic (Monnin et al. 2004). The Dome C atmospheric CO2 record ends in the year 1777.

A) Correlation of planetary temperature and solar wind modulation of geomagnetic field index.

In Figure 6 the long-term variations in global temperature are compared to the long-term variations in geomagnetic activity as expressed by the ak-index (Nevanlinna and Kataja 2003). The correlation between the two quantities is 0.85 with p<0.01 for the whole period studied. It could therefore be concluded that both the decreasing correlation between sunspot number and geomagnetic activity, and the deviation of the global temperature long-term trend from solar activity as expressed by sunspot index are due to the increased number of high-speed streams of solar wind on the declining phase and in the minimum of sunspot cycle in the last decades.

B) Two mechanisms by which solar winds (electroscavenging) and changes to the solar heliosphere modulate (ion mediated nucleation) planetary clouds (see paper for details this excerpt describes concerning electroscavenging which is not discussed at Real Climate as it is “off message”,)

The solar wind affects the galactic cosmic ray flux, the precipitation of relativistic electrons, and the ionospheric potential distribution in the polar cap, and each of these modulates the ionosphere-earth current density. On the basis of the current density-cloud hypothesis the variations in the current density change the charge status of aerosols that affect the ice production rate and hence the cloud microphysics and climate [e.g., Tinsley and Dean, 1991; Tinsley, 2000]. The underlying mechanism is that charged aerosols are more effective than neutral aerosols as ice nuclei (i.e., electrofreezing) and that the enhanced collections of charged evaporation nuclei by supercooled droplets enhance the production of ice by contact ice nucleation (i.e., electroscavenging). Both electrofreezing and electroscavenging
involve an increase in ice production with increasing current density [e.g, Tinsley and Dean, 1991; Tinsley, 2000]. The current density-cloud hypothesis appears to explain solar cycle effects on winter storm dynamics as well as the dayto-day changes of Wilcox and Roberts Effects [e.g., Tinsley, 2000]. Kniveton and Todd [2001] found evidence of a statistically strong relationship between cosmic ray flux, precipitation and precipitation efficiency over ocean surfaces at midlatitudes to high latitudes, and they pointed out that their results are broadly consistent with the current density-cloud hypothesis.

Mechanism where Changes in Solar Activity Affects Planetary Cloud Cover
1) Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR)
Increases in the suns large scale magnetic field and increased solar wind reduces the magnitude of GCR that strike the earth’s atmosphere. Satellite data shows that there is 99.5% correlation of GCR level and low level cloud cover 1974 to 1993.

2) Increase in the Global Electric Circuit
Starting around 1993, GCR and low level cloud cover no longer correlate. (There is a linear reduction in cloud cover.) The linear reduction in cloud cover does correlate with an increase in high latitude solar coronal holes, particularly at the end of to the solar cycle, which cause high speed solar winds. The high speed solar winds cause a potential difference between earth and the ionosphere. The increase in potential difference removes cloud forming ions from the atmosphere through the process “electro scavenging”. Satellite data (See attached link to Palle’s paper) that confirms that there has been a reduction in cloud cover over the oceans (There is a lack of cloud forming ions over the oceans. There are more ions over the continents due to natural radioactivity of the continental crust that is not shielded from the atmosphere by water.)

As evidence for a cloud—cosmic ray connection has emerged, interest has risen in the various physical mechanisms whereby ionization by cosmic rays could influence cloud formation. In parallel with the analysis of observational data by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen (1997), Marsh and Svensmark (2000) and Palle´and Butler (2000), others, including Tinsley (1996), Yu (2002) and Bazilevskaya et al. (2000), have developed the physical understanding of how ionization by cosmic rays may influence the formation of clouds. Two processes that have recently received attention by Tinsley and Yu (2003) are the IMN process and the electroscavenging process.

Comments: William:
1. There is also evidence that GCR changes modulate high altitude cirrus clouds. The affect is opposite to that of low level clouds. i.e. High levels of GCR and resulting ionization result in an increase in low level clouds and reduction in high altitude cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds warm high latitude regions particularly in the winter due to the greenhouse affect of their ice particles.
2. There is a different solar mechanism that is responsible for the 10 to 12 year delay in the onset of cooling that is observed in the past when there is change from a series of short solar cycles to a long solar cycle or to an interruption of the solar magnetic cycle.

Why is everybody wondering about the insistence of IPCC that the observed 1980-1998 global warming is caused by humans? It is exactly what they are supposed to do!
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1998 by two United Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, an intergovernmental organization) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP; many suborganizations). The principles governing the IPCC work are outlined in a document that was approved in 1988 and amended in 2003 an on April 26-28, 2006 (www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles.pdf):
“1. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shall concentrate its activities on the tasks allotted to it by the relevant WMO … and UNEP … resolutions and decisions as well as on actions in support of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process.
2. The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive … basis … the information relevant to … human-induced climate change …”
The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) document says:
“The Parties to this Convention …, Concerned that human activities … will result … in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere …”
and in Article 1, Definitions:
“ 2. “Climate Change” means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to the natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.”
It follows that the IPCC
1. is an intergovernmental organization (hence subject to politics),
2. is subject to instructions (unheard of in pure science), and
3. has to support the hypothesis of human-induced climate change.

“Certified emission reductions” (of carbon dioxide) etc. are then used (via the Kyoto Protocol, e.g., Articles 10 and 11) to transfer money from “sinning” nations to developing nations. This has been said most clearly by Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer (co-chair of WR3, AR4 (2007) of the IPCC) in an interview (in German) published by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ am Sonntag, 24 November 2010; online (www.nzz.ch, 7 December 2010):
“Basically, industrialized countries have expropriated in a way the atmosphere of the global society. It has to be said clearly: we redistribute de facto global wealth by climate politics. … One should abandon the illusion that international climate politics is environmental politics. Basically, climate politics has practically nothing to do with environmental politics anymore, for example forest deaths or the ozone hole.”

Thanks for fighting fire with fire. Reason and evidence don’t seem to work with the warmists, who are selective in their understanding of skeptical arguments. They cherry-pick their quotations from the whole cloth of skeptical discourse to set up distracting straw-man arguments. Much better to remind readers of who they are and what they have done, than to engage in futile circular debates with them. And you use a reputable secondary source (which for some reason is the gold-standard of evidence in Wikipedia articles, as opposed to primary documents, the bread-and-butter for true historians and encyclopedists).

Discussions of William M. Connolley’s status at Wikipedia are largely a distraction from the more interesting discussion of Rawls post.
However, if I can put some items to rest:
Connolley was an administrator, is not currently an administrator, but the change of status was not a stripping by management. The position of administrator is conferred and removed by community consensus. Furthermore, it is simplistic and inaccurate to attribute the removal of administrator status to his editing of global warming articles.
Connolley was barred from editing articles about climate change, but that prohibition has ended. He is very knowledgeable about many aspects of the subject, and the summary dismissal of his points, simply because he isn’t a skeptic, is unwise. Disagree with him when and if he is wrong, conceded his points when he is right, and we will slowly advance toward understanding. Neither blind acceptance nor blind rejection will be helpful.
Connolley is providing relevant links in the discussion of Rawls points – I hope we can return to a discussion of those points.

“Such a high degree of correlation over such long time periods implies causality, which can only go one way. Global temperature cannot be driving solar activity, so there must be some mechanism by which solar activity is driving or modulating global temperature change
————
This is a logic fail. If two separate things are trending together it’s does not follow that one causes the other.”

Second part is LazyTeenager.

So, Lazy, you don’t believe increased energy output by the sun can warm the Earth? While your statement is generally true, there’s a clear and obvious method by which solar activity can warm the planet. The physical processes are understood quite well, and as Alec pointed out, the correlation is quite strong.

“Of course they omit natural phenomenona, they do so because they’re not charged with taking natural into account.”

I’ve noticed the sun’s been up for longer periods each day the last few months. Should the IPCC — as they’re “not charged with taking natural[sic] into account” — conclude from that that in about a year, we’ll have continuous day light?

Simply amazingly anti-science position: “we’re looking at a natural system, but we’ll ignore natural drivers of the system”. It’s as if I asserted that the source of all the water in the Ohio river are the waste-water treatment facilities along its course.

William M Connolley says:
“This is describing a GCM study, based on the Lean ’95 reconstruction, ”

Alex Rawls claims that the models assume that CO2 is 40 times as effective as solar (TSI) in terms of climate change. You quote Lean ’95 as reconstructing TSI and UV. This implies that relying on this Lean ’95 paper will not do a proper job of analyzing whether solar wind / magnetic effects are important. Since you quote the IPCC as relying, at least in part, on Lean -95 as justifying the opinion that solar effects are not of great importance in climate change, it appears you haven’t really responded to Alex’s complaint about the IPCC position.

I note that you, too, are implicitly dismissing the post author’s argument that IPCC has ignored solar forcing; the Stott paper is (as you’d expect)

Indeed the work of Stott e.a. is referenced, but with some caveats::

In addition, a combined analysis of the response at the surface and through the depth of the atmosphere using HadCM3 and the solar reconstruction of Lean et al. (1995) concluded that the near-surface temperature response to solar forcing over 1960 to 1999 is much smaller than the response to greenhouse gases (Jones et al., 2003). This conclusion is also supported by the vertical pattern of climate change, which is more consistent with the response to greenhouse gas than to solar forcing (Figure 9.1).

Stott used the HadCM3 model with 10x solar, according to Lean e.a. and Hoyt and Schatten, not mentioned in the IPCC report, to check a possible better attribution of its weak TSI variability. They found that solar statistically might be underestimated by a factor of about 2 at the cost of the influence of CO2 (20% less). But again, within the constraints of the model. If one sets no minimum border on the influence of aerosols (-1.5 W/m2 in the model), it might be as well 5 times (that means no influence of CO2 at all…). Thus the attribution problem still is far from solved, if you don’t let the constraint of aerosol influence interfere with the statistics.

Further, the “vertical pattern of climate change” is not consistent with a response to greenhouse gases at all, as Figure 9.1 in this case shows the “hot spot” in the upper troposphere in the tropics, which doesn’t exist…

Well done, generally. I’ve been arguing the same way ever since I discovered the climate problem a decade plus ago. Simply looking at the last 100 years of the reasonably reliable climate record, while both CO_2 and Solar Activity in general increased and/or remained high, only solar activity correlates well with the VARIATIONS in the upward trending data. Yes, there are a ton of other possibly confounding variables (in particular the effect of decadal oscillations) but if one was simply fitting the data with two parameters, solar activity and CO_2, there is obvious covariance sufficient to permit a decent fit to be made with an entire range of attribution of warming to CO_2 and solar activity. However, a CO_2 only model fails to explain the deviations from monotonic increase in temperature, where solar activity can, in a reasonable theory, provide an explanation.

The evidence for the importance of solar forcing is indeed being strengthened by the year as the current solar cycle advances, arguably the lowest in at least a century. First, there is a levelling (at least) of global temperatures. Second, this levelling is accompanied by secular changes in important climate parameters, e.g. H_2O levels in the stratosphere. Third, it is accompanied by a measured increase in the Earth’s bond albedo via the proxy of reflected Earthlight from the visible dark face of the moon. Solar forcing is directly tied to bond albedo in every viable theory of global climate; at the Earth’s mean temperature it has an effect on the theoretical greybody temperature of the planet (the baseline from which the GHE proceeds) of roughly 1K per 0.01 in bond albedo. An increase from 0.30 to 0.31, in other words, would decrease global temperatures by roughly 1K completely independent of everything else — an amount sufficient to cancel at least 2/3 of the total observed warming of the last century to century and a half.

Taken together, these observations both place increasingly severe limits on the hypothesized positive additional forcing that is required beyond what the CO_2 portion of the GHE is supposed to produce, and damn skippy, is a clear case of omitted variable fraud.

It would be very interesting to build a completely unbiased parametric predictive model of the global climate, one with good forecast and hindcast capabilities when prepared with only selected portions of the climate record. In particular, it would be interesting to build a neural network based predictive model — more or less my speciality. It is for all practical purposes impossible to force a neural network (whose inputs are just tables of “neurified” numbers for trainging purposes where one doesn’t even have to label the variables, the ultimate in double blind fitting) to choose one variable over another when the two are covariant, and unlike traditional model NNs don’t require one to worry about covariance when preparing the model data — as long as you avoid including the “answer” in proxy form, they will simply optimize the contributions from two or more partially correlated variables.

It is similarly difficult to interpret the result — a NN might have several thousand weights that are all mutually optimized to produce a good predictive model (one that is neither overfit nor underfit and that was robust against random retrainings with different partitionings of training and trial data) and one cannot point to the 1027th of them and say “this one represents the contribution of CO_2”. But this is their strength in this case. Neither can one go in and preset the 1027th weight to force it to make CO_2 the primary driver. One has to infer the NN’s eventual decomposition by performing various projections of input data to determine what it has decided the sensitivity is to single variable forcings with all other variables fixed.

I do have one criticism of the top article, though. It is easy to let anger slip through into postings on WUWT, but in a scientific critique they have little to no place. Such a critique should be written in a dispassionate way. I hope and assume that the actual AR5 report was written in this way, however much anger slipped through into the top article.

We would all do well to remember that while some participants in the CAGW scare (if not scam) may well be dishonest and deceptive — quite possibly dishonest first of all to themselves, making it far easier to justify fooling others — I would expect that most of them are not. Some of them, as we have very recently seen, are willing to walk away and publicly repudiate the entire process when they perceive of the scientific process being corrupted to political ends.

The proper thing to do in the case of AR5 is present, as the top author had done, a detailed critique of omitted science and publications, and I even think under the circumstances that it is fair to directly address omitted variable fraud in the discussion, to put them on their guard. It is then up to the IPCC to take this criticism seriously, or open themselves up to immediate rebuttal if they fail to modify the report. Documenting the omissions and clearly laying out the reasons that this is not good science makes them all the more vulnerable to the mounting criticism of overt bias if they fail to directly address them in the final document.

The stakes are high. The climate is going to do what the climate is going to do, and it is not doing what the CO_2-only model predicts that it should be doing right now. More and more real scientists, including climate scientists contributing work to AR5 and the IPCC, are being forced to confront this by the only thing that ultimately matters — the actual data.

If the IPCC fails — for the fifth time — to address the scientific weaknesses in the CAGW scenario, after they have been fairly and objectively pointed out in the very critical reports that they have solicited in an admirably open process — then I rather suspect that they will be marginalized and blasted apart, as there at this point a number of government watchdogs in the large granting agencies who are responsive to allegations of confirmation bias and the politicization of the scientific process, whether or not the IPCC is.

“Boot Connelly off here for life. His actions go before him. If this is the same twit from Wiki: boot him off! It’s good that someone, or anyone, bats for the AGW here but not Connelly.
We booted Emmanuel so and so off here for life for being repetitive and boring about his Iron Sun. Connelly’s actions at Wiki, if true, are far more eggregious.

Boot Connelly off here for life.

All those in favour say ey”

Nay.

Banning comments is a standard totalitarian tactic used at AGW advocacy sites such are Real Climate, SkepticalScience, and others.

If Connelly is prepared to debate the science here, then he should certainly be allowed to do so.

> The past warming and cooling cycles all correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes

Could be. But you present no refs, so I can’t judge. Please do so.

Bob Kutz> how on earth can you make the claim that the IPCC isn’t convinced of CAGW? This; “# Warming of the climate system is unequivocal. # Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (>90%) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations. # Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the times…

I can sense your outrage as I read the words as they are actually written, rather than the meaning you want them to have. “# Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” Certainly it is. But “unequivocal” just means cannot-be-reasonably-disagreed-with, not “catastrophic”. And similarly for your other points. Why can you not even read the material that you quote?

It isn’t. You won’t find the phrase used at all. You just made it up.”

Saying the phrase is not used at all is a far cry from making something up. On this point you are cornered. David did not use quotation marks and the IPCC firmly indicates an endorsement of the notion that current warming is caused by anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and that it is catastrophic.

Given your rebuke of poor David, how do you explain this;

“The IPCC WGI Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC,2007) came to a more confident assessment of the causes of global temperature change than previous reports and concluded that “most of
the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”. It also concluded that “discernible human influences now extend to other aspects of climate, including ocean warming, continentalaverage temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns. Since then, warming over Antarctica has also been attributed to human influence, and further evidence has accumulated attributing a wider range of climate changes to human activities. Such changes are broadly consistent with theoretical understanding, and climate model simulations,of how the planet is expected to respond.”

That’s taken from the IPCC websites pdf version of the meeting report from the “IPCC Expert Meeting on Detection and Attribution Related to Anthropogenic Climate Change” held by the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland 14–16 September 2009. It directly sites AR4’s claim that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”.

Given that WGIII (TAR4) concerns itself with mitigation strategies including carbon taxes and investment in renewable (though it doesn’t mention non-carbon based, curiously) energy, and restrictions on motor vehicle production and usage and “land use regulation and enforcement”, it would be hard to justify the notion at they (IPCC) don’t view this change as catastrophic. They certainly describe it as such.

If that isn’t the IPCC supporting the CAGW dogma in your opinion, then your opinion is no longer relevant to any conversations of logic and science.

I see little danger that this wonderful post will be found wrong, but not from the solar influence point of view. First, it turns out that all 4 main atmospheric gases, N2, O2, water vapor, and CO2 have IR absorption capabilities. The IR absorption spectrum of air clearly shows the strong influence from N2 and O2. It also turns out that CO2 absorbance abilities are rather limited compared to the other three gases. In light of being a truly minor player regarding IR absorption/emission, CO2 simply does not have a detectable influence.

Second, direct chemical bottle CO2 data, gathered together by Ernst Beck, clearly shows that CO2 has been much higher than now during three periods of the last 200 years, showing lag times and great variability relative to temperature.

Third, according to Jaworowski, an authority on ice cores, ice cores are severely traumatized during extraction and, besides some in situ chemistry that decreases detectable CO2 from the samples, extensive microfracturing occurs. Thus, he considers that ice cores lose 30–50% of their CO2 before assay. If you take the published ice core CO2 values and back calculate these losses, the values are equal to or greater than the atmospheric CO2 today.

To assume that ice cores show absolute CO2 values of old atmosphere is just plain stupid. For the IPCC to allow and support ice core data to be merged with Mauna Loa volcano CO2 data is intellectual and scientific dishonesty, amounting to fraud and, taking into account the policy decisions involved, criminal intent.

A preview of AR5 and the aftermath. Sounds like if you squint and stare really hard right in one place long enough, you’ll see it until you look somewhere else. Stop looking somewhere else, because it’s really, really important to the world that you don’t look somewhere else. A whole lot of forcing and not much falling into place. No action required. Or will they scale the catastrophe higher this time round after scaling it lower to appear at least a little credible last time?

You may not be able to prove that their rejection of the variable(s) is intentionally fraudulent without evidence that they know or should know that their rejection is false (tempting to conclude but hard to prove intent). Or is this IPCC project subject to various nations’ FOIA law? If FOI is important for any issue, it’s this effort to establish the behind the curtain edict as global authority for everything from science to how we live and breathe.

But cheer up, the LA times is promoting every agnostic from holocaust denier to Adolf Eichmann.

I have to agree with William M. Connolley . The important question is what caused the 1970 to 2000 measured warming.

An analysis that focused on this period would make a more compelling argument.

The GCR theory is plausible, although I favour tropospheric aerosol reductions as the main cause of the 1970-2000 warming. But then GCRs and aerosols seed clouds in similar ways. So what seems to evidence for one may be evidence for the other.

Any good reason not to include the 2000-2012 period in there?

Oh, wait, perhaps it is because there was no measured warming at all, so that the entire period confounds the CO_2-only hypothesis, with last month’s lower troposphere 33-year mean anomaly negative once again.

Actually, the most compelling arguments are the ones with the longest time base, not the shortest. To discuss the causes of any local warming or cooling trend, it helps to know the long timescale natural variability of the system. It then helps to regulate your explanations of the local trend with the possible causes of the observed natural variability.

When this is done on a scale longer than 100 years, what is revealed is that natural variability can account for 100% of the local warming. We aren’t even out there at a 2 sigma event over the last 12,000 years, and the initial baseline of the thermometric era was not only a 2 sigma event, it was a three or four sigma event on the low side. Global temperatures are not geologically “unprecedented” — that is blatent fraud in and of itself as a glance at the non-CAGW-reconstructed paleoclimatological record clearly reveals.

So no, looking at a 30 year baseline is not “the important question”, at least not if you want to have a chance of finding the right answer. Before you can analyze a signal, you first have to correctly identify the range of the noise and its natural variability, and then systematically obtain the predictors of that variability. CO_2 cannot be ascertained to be the primary driver of the variations observed now without fully accounting for the natural variations over centuries and millennia where it was not a relevant (variable) driver at all.

You still have a shot, before global cooling is an established fact, to make a rapid turn around and save some shred of your reputations.

They should not wait too long. See the two slopes for surface sea level temperatures. There has been no change for 15 years and the slope for the last 10 years is -0.00962834 per year. If they are waiting for 17 years of no positive slope, they will really have egg on their faces. (Also the latest UAH value for AQUA ch05 is now 0.35 C below the previous lowest value since 2002!)

But why do the moderators allow him to derail the discussion from the point of the post? Why is this type of thread-jacking allowed? I can’t believe that anyone would quote WikiPedia as an authoritative source — for example…

Bob Kutz says:
February 22, 2012 at 8:31 am
“William, how on earth can you make the claim that the IPCC isn’t convinced of CAGW?
This; […]
is from a wikipedia article you yourself edited as recently as January 28, 2012. The source cited is the IPCC summary for policy makers. I think you are familiar with it.”

You can’t argue with William M. Connolley by citing the wikipedia. William M. Connolley would in that case do one of two things:
-Tell you that wikipedia, according to wikipedia, is not a reliable source
-Change the article you’re citing to say what he wants.

John West says:
February 22, 2012 at 8:46 am
Johnnythelowery says:
“Boot Connelly for life from here!!!! …………………………………….. Please.

All those in favour say Ey”

NAY!

He can’t edit here, let him spout where he can be refuted for all to see.
—————————————–
You can’t trust him. You can’t trust that he believes what he is saying is true; because in the past said things were true when he knew damn well they wern’t. See the difference between a person with countervailing ideas (see Leif V Scarfetta) and a liar.
1. He might be saying it because he believes it to be true (and is qualified to hold the opinion)
2. He might be saying it because it serves a purpose
3. He might be saying it to wind us up, muddy the waters, waste our time
4. He might saying it because it frustrates those who search for truth

Coach Springer, “You may not be able to prove that their rejection of the variable(s) is intentionally fraudulent without evidence that they know or should know that their rejection is false ”

The IPCC has already stated that they believe that all natural factors and cycles have been overwhelmed by CO2. We’re done—intentionally fraudulent it is. Too many people have pointed out that this is wrong for them not to be intentionally continuing to ignore natural factors.

Ignoring important natural cycles entirely fits their needs for a political agenda centered around demonizing CO2 as the controller of our climate and accusing humans of messing with the controller.

Bottom line: the IPCC cannot afford to EVER admit to being wrong, goal-oriented, or dishonest, as they would then fail their political propaganda mission. This has nothing to do with science and all to do with political expediency.

I am disappointed that the moderators have left an apparently (self-snip) Wikipedia-banned propagandist like Connolley post oven a dozen times and derail what could have been an interesting scientific discussion. This is a waste.

Rawls: “[U]nlike warming, cooling is actually dangerous and really can feed back on itself in runaway fashion.”

I’m not questioning that on balance cooling from present levels is less friendly to humans than warming. But there may be others here who like me are unfamiliar with the rationale for that passage’s runaway-feedback comment. Further explanation would be welcome.

Philip Bradley: I have to agree with William M. Connolley . The important question is what caused the 1970 to 2000 measured warming.

Even if that were the only important question, the answer to that question requires the answers to many other questions, such as:”Is there any evidence that the 1970-200 warming had a different cause from previous warmings?” and “Has the 1970-2000 warming ended?”

> You sure do. And many of us has more than a clue as to the bias of the language, choice of references and so on in some of the articles.

“I doubt it. I’ve asked several times for examples of such (in other threads) and people always back off (though I wouldn’t want to derail this thread with more wiki stuff).”

That “people always back off” is very unlikely, even if their perceptions were wrong. Who are you trying to fool, yourself?

> Your response seems to be that you know that most of the processes are well known and understood. Still, without a temperature increase correlation, you have nothing

“You really really don’t understand, do you? It isn’t based on correlation, it is based on the underlying physical processes. If you want to understand how the attribution analysis is done, you’ll need to actually read it.”
**********************************************
Yes, I understand you have avoided actually responding to my original claim, and now just repeat your own without support, while misrepresenting what I said, and adding some juicy innuendo for flavor.

I don’t need to understand some “attribution analysis” to know that it isn’t possible to know what is not known or that “most” is known and understood. That is a statement of faith, not of science.

And I didn’t say theory was based on correlation:
February 22, 2012 at 5:13 am “The explanations (theories) may begin with limited understanding of Earth’s complex physical processes, but the correlations are what “gave rise” to them.”

The observation that the earth is warming is explained by certain processes, William. Not the other way around. Without observations of warming, explanations of warming are rather moot, don’t you think? And observations of cooling or no warming, in the absence of good reasons, would falsify AGW.

William M. Connolley previously sanctioned and desysopped8.1) In the Abd-William M. Connolley arbitration case (July–September 2009), William M. Connolley was found to have misused his admin tools while involved. As a result, he lost administrator permissions, and was admonished and prohibited from interacting with User:Abd. Prior to that, he was sanctioned in Requests for arbitration/Climate change dispute (2005, revert parole – which was later overturned by the Committee here) and Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Geogre-William M. Connolley (2008, restricted from administrative actions relating to Giano II). He was also the subject of RFC’s regarding his conduct: RfC 1 (2005) and RfC 2 (2008). The 2008 RFC was closed as improperly certified.

Passed 6 to 0 with 2 abstentions, 14:10, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

William M. Connolley has been uncivil and antagonistic8.2) William M. Connolley has been uncivil and antagonistic to editors within the topic area, and toward administrators enforcing the community probation. (Selection of representative examples:[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] [17][18][19] [20] )

This uncivil and antagonistic behaviour has included refactoring of talk page comments by other users,(examples:[21][22][23] ) to the point that he was formally prohibited from doing so. In the notice advising him that a consensus of 7 administrators had prohibited his refactoring of talk page posts, he inserted commentary within the post of the administrator leaving the notice on his talk page.[24]] For this action, he was blocked for 48 hours; had the block extended to 4 days with talk page editing disabled due to continuing insertions into the posts of other users on his talk page; had his block reset to the original conditions; then was blocked indefinitely with talk page editing disabled when he again inserted comments into the posts of others on his talk page.[25] After extensive discussion at Administrator noticeboard/Incidents, the interpretation of consensus was that the Climate Change general sanctions did not extend to the actions of editors on their own talk pages, and the block was lifted.

Passed 8 to 0, 14:10, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

William M. Connolley’s edits to biographies of living persons8.5) William M. Connolley has focused a substantial portion of his editing in the Climate change topic area on biographical articles about living persons who hold views opposed to his own with respect to the reality and significance of anthropogenic global warming, in a fashion suggesting that he does not always approach such articles with an appropriately neutral and disinterested point of view.

I notice that William M.Connolley has not explained how a correlation that existed up to 1970 can be of no more importance after 1970. Did the laws of physics change, William M. Connolley? Please give us a quote from IPCC AR4 about that.

Also:
William M. Connolley says:
February 22, 2012 at 5:44 am
“> The physical processes are not fully known or understood
But you shouldn’t measure the lack of knowledge by your own. Most of the processes are indeed well known and understood. Some important ones (clouds, or contrails) aren’t so well. ”

The problem with that, William M. Connolley, is of course, as you must know, that an iterative model will necessarily deviate with each timestep more and more from reality; especially in light of your admission that some important processes aren’t so well understood. (I don’t even have to mention chaos here; it would even be true for a non-chaotic system)

How can you for these obviously erroneous models maintain the notion that running them over a 100 virtual years will tell us ANYTHING about the reality in 100 years? I can’t believe that you are ignorant to not understand the futility of such attempts.

We can, even though we don’t know all the processes exactly, forecast the weather for a maximum of 5 days. After that, the deviation becomes too large to give meaningful forecasts.

The IPCC argues that they don’t make forecasts (another word for forecast is PREDICTION) but only sample the possible solution space in a 100 years from now (calling that PROJECTION).

But any fool can see that that state space is for all practical considerations practically infinite. How can an ensemble run that runs some models, say, a thousand times inform us in any way about the likelihood of certain outcomes? Calling this “undersampling” would be ridiculous, “nearly not sampling at all” is more appropriate.

This is all trivial and must be known to the IPCC’s climate modelers yet they continue to pretend that their models have some imaginary value for telling us about the future in 100 years. This can only be described as professional misconduct, and charges should be brought; I’d like to hear what they’d say in their defence when sued for misappropriation of funds.

“I can sense your outrage as I read the words as they are actually written, rather than the meaning you want them to have. “# Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” Certainly it is. But “unequivocal” just means cannot-be-reasonably-disagreed-with, not “catastrophic”. And similarly for your other points. Why can you not even read the material that you quote?”

William, your condescending attitude is truly pathetic, and the last refuge of climate alarmists. I took the notion of catastrophic as a given in the argument. I full well understand the definition of the word unequivocal. Perhaps you should look up the meaning of the word obtuse.

If they (IPCC) don’t believe AGW is catastrophic why are they advocating economically damaging policy to prevent it? Why is there such heated debate, if they believe there is no threat involved. Why would our leaders be trying to tax carbon, if the effects were believed to be either neutral or beneficial?

Simple; they do believe (or claim to believe) it’s catastrophic. The IPCC is built on the notion that it’s catastrophic. That’s why it exists. If they came out with a report that said; ‘it’s global, humans are the cause, but we are all going to be fine really, enjoy the sunshine’, there’d be no cause for their further existence. You of all people should be aware of the notion that people don’t willingly point out their uselessness.

Their (IPCC) prognostications include; “hundreds of millions of people exposed to increased water stress” TAR, WGIII, Summary for policy makers, magnitudes of impact.
“significant extinctions around the globe’, ibid
“increased damage from floods and storms”, ibid’
“millions more people could experience flooding each year”, ibid
“increased burden from malnutrition, diarrhoeal, cardio-respiratory, and infectious disease”,ibid
“increased mortality from heat waves, floods and droughts”,ibid
“substantial burden on health services”,ibid
further on they characterize as ‘likely’ the chances that the AGW will result in “Increased risk of food and water shortage; increased risk of malnutrition; increased risk of water- and food-borne diseases”, ibid

I’ve done the reading William, have you?

Are you really trying to stand on the notion that IPCC does not support the notion that AGW is catastrophic? Really?

Perhaps it’s not I who’s reading skills require remedial attention. Perhaps a course in elementary logic would also do you well.

William M. Connolley says:Errm, that is a plot of the CET. You must have a point, though I confess I can’t see what that point is.

Graph speaks louder than 100s of the CO2 AGW papers.
Point is very clear : 350 years no temperature rise!
And why not?
I added the frequency spectrum, note strongest component is not the TSI’s period but the Hale cycle.http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CETjun.htm
In my initial post I said:there appear to be strong indication that temperature changes and the solar activity are in a certain degree of synchronisation, but the mechanism is still eluding the mainstream science, while some of us on the fringes have (or think to have) a pretty good idea what that mechanism may be.http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NVa.htm

Johnnie the lowery says
“In the decision, a slap-down for the once-powerful Connolley by his peers, he has been barred from participating in any article, discussion or forum dealing with global warming. In addition, because he rewrote biographies of scientists and others he disagreed with, to either belittle their accomplishments or make them appear to be frauds, Wikipedia barred him — again unanimously — from editing biographies of those in the climate change field.”

When I frequently referred to it, mostly that the increase in CO2 compares to next-to-nothing if you look at all the water vapor and clouds in the atmosphere, and the actual mechanism of the GHG effect, which would imply that it must be minimum temps pushing up average temperatures (which I did not see happening, globally….).
I found later somebody had changed the definition to make it more in line with AGW thinking…

For example, currently
the contribution of the GH Gases to the GH effect in Wikipedia is totally mis- stated
water 30-70%
CO2 9-26%
Surely anybody can understand if average water vapor alone is 0.5% (excluding clouds) and CO2 is 0.04% that those figures in Wikipedia cannot be right. So who planted them there?

And lest someone say, “but the build-up of heat in the oceans due to the “energy imbalance”; it is obvious that there must be warming”: My answer would be : if the climate system worked in such a simplistic way, WHY USE SUPERCOMPUTERS AT ALL if that is so easy? Again, a grossly expensive and illogical enterprise!

Of course it’s not that easy, as fluctuations in water vapour, surface temperature etc. lead to ever-changing radiation, moving energy into space.

But the climate models used to simulate that are for the simple reasons I mentioned above nothing but computer games without any practical worth. They can’t tell us what the Earth climate system will do the next week. Let alone in 100 years.

I am a AGW skeptic (not that changes CO2 cannot have an effect on the climate system, but more of the certainty, based on my studies of past climate when I was a geology major), but I also appreciate Dr Connolley stopping by. I agree with the comment that it’s silly to focus on the trivial Wiki removal, as WC has shown it’s not for the reasons many say it is. We should stick to the science and the disagreements therein.

“Bob Kutz> the IPCC firmly indicates an endorsement of the notion that current warming is … catastrophic

No it doesn’t, you’re just making things up.”

William, read what I have posted. I cite the sources at the IPCC’s own website. You can look this stuff up. see comment above; Bob Kutz February 22, 2012 at 9:41 am. The source document is TAR, WGIII, Summary for Policy Makers, Magnitude of Impacts. I have provided the quotes.

If you are unwilling to refute the source material I have sited, you have confirmed for everyone here that you’ve no credentials.

Ah, progress. You’ve now admitted that the C-word is yours, and not the IPCC’s.

> If they (IPCC) don’t believe AGW is catastrophic why are they advocating economically damaging policy to prevent it?

Firstly, I’m reading the WGI report, which doesn’t make any policy recommendations. WGII and III are more policy-focussed, but even then I’m not sure you’re right.

Secondly, you seem to think in rather all-or-nothing terms: in your world, either GW is catastrophic, and we do stuff, or it is non-catastrophic, and we do nothing. That is clearly unrealistic.

> Why is there such heated debate, if they believe there is no threat involved

Because there is a threat; but it might not be “catastrophic”, depending of course on what that ill-defined word might mean to you.

> For example, currently the contribution of the GH Gases to the GH effect in Wikipedia is totally mis- stated water 30-70% CO2 9-26% Surely anybody can understand if average water vapor alone is 0.5% (excluding clouds) and CO2 is 0.04% that those figures in Wikipedia cannot be right

You seem to be relying on proof-by-incredulity, which is invalid. The figures are approximate, but reasonable.

@Alec Rawls: Thank you for devoting so much energy to this issue. I fear you are indeed correct in your assessment; these people – the IPCC and its supporters like Connelley – are either charlatans or children.

Your response to them does in fact contain a falsifiable prediction – substantial global cooling is on its way – soon. I fear this too; the turmoil in this old world is going to skyrocket and many – probably billions – of people are going to suffer. Perhaps it too will allow us to do what we need to change the paradigm of science funding and other things so that zealots and cheats can no longer hold such sway. Maybe we can send a few of them to jail.

I see it mentioned a few times above, but only a few. And never in the AR reports!
This is that atmospheric CO2 is beneficial, too! (I should not add that “too” to this
sentence.). Forests and crops are growing faster than they were seventy years ago.
And this is totally beneficial to nearly all the species…! Including Homo sapiens.
There is a great deal of literature on this – the ARs should include analysis of this.

Wrong. WG3 is entirely policy focused. IPCC Co-Chair Ottmar Edenhofer stated that “one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore”.

The IPCC is a totally political hyena with a thin veneer of [generally wrong] science for camoflage. Edenhofer candidly admits to its agenda. UN kleptocrats intend to steal what they never earned under the guise of “environmental policy”. Edenhofer makes clear that environmental policy is a smokescreen for international theft.

Connolley says that “there is a threat; but it might not be ‘catastrophic’, depending of course on what that ill-defined word might mean to you.”

Nonsense. There is no indication of any approaching disaster. As a matter of fact, the rise in CO2 is greening the planet. CO2 is a harmless and beneficial trace gas. As the IPCC’s Edenhofer makes clear, the demonization of “carbon” is only a cover story for an immense tax grab to redistribute the wealth of Western taxpayers through the totally corrupt UN [which as always will take its hefty cut], which will then end up in the pockets of despots. And the world’s poor will be just as poor as ever.

As someone reprimanded and disciplined for disseminating false propaganda, Connolley surely knows this. He is just putting his usual spin on the UN’s greedy intentions. The question is, what is Connolley getting out of posting his misrepresentations here?

If there are really so many good papers supporting [Rawls’] viewpoint, why does he need to include an unpublished paper in the list?).

If there were so many good papers supporting the IPCC view, why was Wahl & Amman’s unpublished “Jesus Paper” included in AR4? See. Steve McIntyre was threatened with dismissal from the position of expert reviewer for requesting access to the data that unpublished paper was based on.

The Git supports allowing Connolley being allowed to post here where we can all see his disingenuousness. He also makes the important point that many here are commenting on something they haven’t read. Isn’t that what we detested Gleik for in relation to Donna Laframboise’s Delinquent Teenager?

I think that the evidence that this critique is fundementally sound is that William Connelly is so present on this thread. Obviously you have no interest in debating the underlying science, as this is a regular topic of conversation here. Certainly I’ve never seen you responding to any of Willis’ posts. Why are you here now? Could it be that the rapid response team have seen a serious and real threat that must be discredited as quickly as possible?

If you want people to take you seriously, come by more often. As you can see, all of your posts are being published. Something that would not happen to Anthony at Realclimate. Otherwise, you leave it open to assume that you are “on the job”, just as you were at Wikipedia. You were sanctioned for that William. Here is just one of those sanctions. Seems that you are more able to express your opinions here than Wikipedia. How close minded of us.

William M. Connolley (talk · contribs) is prohibited from editing comments made by other editors about climate change or that appear on discussion pages related to climate change (broadly interpreted), for a duration of two months.

Dave Dardinger> Alex Rawls claims that the models assume that CO2 is 40 times as effective as solar (TSI) in terms of climate change.

William Connolley said:
Yes, but he just made it up. It isn’t true. You’ll notice he provides no evidence for the claim.

Alex said:
[I’m not going to quote the actual numbers, but yeah, the ratio is an astounding 40 to 1, up from 14 to 1 in AR4, which listed total solar forcing as 0.12 W/m^2, vs. 1.66 for CO2.]

Admittedly Alex didn’t quote the numbers from AR5 in an attempt to stay within the secrecy requirements imposed on the reviewers, but he does list the AR4 numbers. Do you say these are made up? Please note that the point isn’t that the numbers given can’t be derived from particular sets of data, but that (assuming the statistical values Alex gives are reasonably correct), they don’t match with reality. That is, if the proxies for solar values explain on the close order of half of the temperature variations for a very long period of time, there must be a mechanism for producing this correlation. And since solar wind reducing cosmic ray flux is a reasonable mechanism, it needs to be described in detail in AR5, and how this will (would) effect the attribution of temperature changes from CO2 must be presented. The same would be true for other reasonable mechanisms.

Let me put it another way as well. The “total solar forcing” value of .12 W/m^2 is really just a proxy for what might be called the “total solar influence”. The forcing value comes from the difference in all radiation hitting the earth (probably divided by 4, but I’m not going to go look that up as it’s not of particular importance). But just as a small energy difference on an electronic sensor can result in a large door being opened at great energy expenditure, so a relatively small change in total solar energy reaching the earth can be an indicator of a much larger difference in the solar energy reaching the earth’s surface by means of an indirect means such as change in albedo from change in cloud cover from cosmic ray influence.

Something similar for the knowledge of late Jaworowski on ice cores, which ended around 1992. Most of his objections were already rejected by the work of Etheridge e.a. of 1996 on three Law Dome ice cores.
His objections against the merging of ice core data and Mauna Loa data by Neftel is based on his own error: he assumes that the gas age is similar to the age of the ice layers, which is proven wrong. At closing depth, the gas age is in average much younger (30 years in the case of Law Dome) than the surrounding ice. This was calculated by Neftel for the Siple Dome ice core and confirmed by Etheridge for Law Dome by measuring both the CO2 levels in the still open pores in firn top down to closing depth and in already closed bubbles in the ice. See further:http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html
heavily discussed at WUWT:https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/20/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-2/

If one is asking for facts that there strong geometric correlations between solar functions and the global climate proxies, here are two.

The first one is the fact that the reconstructed temperature variations have a correlation with the variation of the frequency of the sun spots:

Because of this correlation there must be a mechanism on the Sun which drives the global temperature variation on Earth.

A more detailed correlation can be seen between solar tide functions and the measured global temperature; spring tides of the couple of Mercury/Earth corresponds with a warm global Earth phase, and nip tides of the couple of Mercury/Earth corresponds with a cold global Earth phase. Because it is already argued that it is out of question that the Earth temperature controls the motion of the two planets there must be a (unknown) mechanism in the Sun, which effects in the global temperature function.

But this correlation is not the only one; because the oscillations of the global sea level probably are can be measured more precise than the global temperatures, there is an other fact that the oscillations of the sea level correlate strong with the solar tide function of the couple of Mercury/Earth.

This is excellent shown in two graphs with different time intervals:

As an extra a simple (A. Einstein would like it) calculation can explain that the coupling of global temperature and sea level (oscillation) is not only fulfilled for high frequencies of month but also on a century.

This is the simple calculation taking the area of the world oceans:

1. The increasing quotient a of the global temperature (hadcrut3) from 1900 AD to 2002 AD is (0.6757° Cel. / 102) a = 0.006625° Cel. per year.

2. The relevant world sea water volume increase for about 1000 m deepness is ~23 mm per 0.1 ° Cel. (@ 19° Cel.) from the property of water.

Check: Mean sea level increasing (1900-2002) from San Francisco is 1.47 mm per year or 149.9 mm for the whole time interval.

If this calculation is correct, it means that the sea level rise in the last century is still a physical slave effect because of the property of water.

There are more comparisons available, showing that all planets with relevant density form a solar tide profile, which correspond to the global temperature. Summing up eleven tide functions there is a strong correlation with the measured global (hadcrut3) temperature:

Remember the task of simulating the global climate, this connection can worked out in a tool to forecast the global climate for the next 1000 years.

But I fear people have more fun with noisy political climate war than simple science work.

Being wrong is one thing. Being Connelly is both: that and something else. It’s the latter that qualifies him for the Boot. Boot Connelly for life from here!!!! …………………………………….. Please.

All those in favour say Ey

I pass. This is Anthony’s blog, it is not a democracy. Anthony has been consistent in letting those with opposing views post here until it’s clear they’re pushing their own agenda or start disagreeing disagreeably.

In Connelley’s case, many people here remember reports of updates to Wikipedia pages reverted by Connelley within minutes, I think this is a good opportunity to study the beast in an environment he can’t edit. With luck, Connelley will learn something about how he sullied Wikipedia as a reference tool. By the way William, see the reference pages up at the top nav bar? I think you deserve some of the credit for them.

Or it could be that he’s here because he can’t reach us at Wikipedia any more.

higley7 > The IR absorption spectrum of air clearly shows the strong influence from N2 and O2.
William M. Connolley> No. N2 and O2 are diatomic.

WMC appears to be correct, although I confess I did not know why, based upon the cryptic answer. However, while recognizing the shortcomings of Wikipedia as a source, recall that many articles contain references which are solid, so if the quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_spectroscopy doesn’t persuade you, feel free to check out the references at the end of the article:
“A molecule can vibrate in many ways, and each way is called a vibrational mode. For molecules with N atoms in them, linear molecules have 3N – 5 degrees of vibrational modes, whereas nonlinear molecules have 3N – 6 degrees of vibrational modes (also called vibrational degrees of freedom). As an example H2O, a non-linear molecule, will have 3 × 3 – 6 = 3 degrees of vibrational freedom, or modes.
Simple diatomic molecules have only one bond and only one vibrational band. If the molecule is symmetrical, e.g. N2, the band is not observed in the IR spectrum, but only in the Raman spectrum. Asymmetrical diatomic molecules, e.g. CO, absorb in the IR spectrum.”

WilliamMC says
You seem to be relying on proof-by-incredulity, which is invalid. The figures are approximate, but reasonable.

Henry@William
William, we are not doing that here, name calling. Here you have to come with actual results.
If the actual average water vapor content in the air is about 0.5% (it varies around this figure) and CO2 is not more that o.04% then the contribution of CO2 to the GHG effect cannot be more than ca. 8%.
If we are then still going to add clouds (which is acknowledged in Wikipedia as a factor below these figures) then water vapor and clouds will probably be like 99% and CO2 <1%
Agreed?
The next thing for you to do would be to look a bit deeper and try to understand that the spectrum of CO2 does not only cause warming (by re-radiating earth light) but that it also causes cooling (by re-radiating sunlight).

I spent several years developing computer models of nuclear power plants for the analysis of the required Nuclear Regulatory Commission accidents and the analysis of several significant accents. The models I developed required the consideration of more than 100 factors. Often, it would take a year or more to “prove” a slightly modified model was a “good” (they were never perfect) through numerous “sensitivity” runs. Followed by weeks of looking at more than a six foot high pile of 11X17 computer paper with 20 to 30 columns of numbers. Find a problem, fix the problem and do it again. But I had a real live nuclear power plant to mimic and real live, actual, data to verify the expected model output with. The AGW modelers have not done this in any fashion whatsoever. Their reverse forecasts do not match, and their predictions do not match reality. Worse yet, and this is where I lose all respect for their so called models, is that they do not include the effects of the Sun or Cosmic radiation, as pointed out in this article.
I am under the impression that the sun radiates the entire Electromagnetic Spectrum (EMS). Well, the EMS is over 20 decades wide. The models they use assume that the levels for their particular band of interest (visible and infrared) remain constant, look at any one of the AGW left-wing-nuts that berate this article or their “factual” links. Their models consider less than 10% of the spectrum – in decades! The majority of their “proof” is to claim “The change in solar radiation is insignificant!” Thus my first questions: what about the radio wave heating effect, what about microwave heating effect, and then the X-ray and Gama ray wavelength and their heating effect. RF Heating is just as effective as IR heating, I have seen both in action, and have been told RF heating is more efficient. Measure change in RF radiation from the sun with a photographic light meter or an IR meter, they are right, it does not change. Measure the change in magnetic flux with a Light meter or IR meter, they are right it does not change. Have I convinced you probably not. So go to an expensive appliance outlet, one that has an induction range. Measure the change in visible light with a light meter with the induction coil of and on. No change. So, since there is no energy coming from the coil with it on, take off your wrist watch and place it on the induction coil. (you may have to defeat the safety interlock by placing a small pan on the coil.) Let me know how long it takes to destroy your watch.
Now throw in these same forms of radiation from the rest of the Universe. What effect do they have? How are they accounted for in the model? As an Amateur Radio Operator I have witnessed firsthand the effects of radio wave radiation. My ~50 ft dipole antenna occasionally picks up over 50 millivolts (into a 50 ohm load) of “noise” from Jupiter. That is 2.5 miliwatts of power, just on a few square milimeters of the Earth’s area. (Before you slam me, Normally it is only around a few microvolts.) I have built and used a transistor radio that got all of its power from it’s short, 24 inch antenna – no batteries at all. Use the power equation, P = I X E, for all of the other radiation ignored in their “models,” add them up and get a guesstimate as to what is missing. Keep in mind we are talking trillions of individual wavelengths (from 10 to the 2nd to ten to the 20th), like trillions of radio stations impacting trillions of square meters of the earth’s surface. In my “feeble” mind, even if the percent absorption for these various wave lengths is low in the atmosphere/ground/water/etc., there is still a rather significant number times this very? small absorption factor, which when I took math is greater than Zero. And, then they all need to be added together and/or some subtracted (e.g., see next paragraph). Yet they ignore it! They just claim “They are constant.” If that is the case, they should correct all of the data concerning the Aurora’s (Northern/Southern lights), And I guess we alaso don’t need to worry about the Coronal Mass Ejections that they warn us about and the ones that others “claim” caused catastrophic damage to the earth about a few thousand years ago
For some other unknown reason the ignore the radiation absorbed by the ocean. Again they obfuscate the issue by claiming the radiation is reflected by the ocean. How can any good scientist make that claim? Look at any radar display of an area near water. The land is gray, mountains and hills are lighter, and many manmade objects are lighter still. However the water is BLACK. Why is the water black? Because it does not reflect the radar waves. The radar waves are absorbed, just like most of the other radio waves. What are these radio waves doing to the ocean? They are heating it up. I have seen a small RF heating unit melt a piece of steel. What are all of the other forms of electromagnetic radiation given off by the Sun doing to the ocean? I have not studied this, but it would be absurd to do as the AGW left-wing-nuts have and assume the only thing heating the earth is visible light waves.
The next question is about CO2. Take a field trip to any one of those energy saving window outlets you see advertized on TV. Ask them to demonstrate one of their IR blocking windows. Note how they can have a Infrared heating element on one side of the window and you feel no heat at all on your side. Now, move the heating element around to the other side. Shazam, there is no heat on that side either. It works both ways. Why do the AGW left-wing-nuts ignore this? Are they ignoring the IR energy given off by the SUN? If the CO2 blocks the IR from leaving the earth doesn’t it block the IR energy from reaching the earth? EVERY graph, chart, pictorial representation I see shows NO IR energy striking the earth. WHY? Please explain.
Then you have the fact that they deny the peer reviewed study by CERN (which they tried to prevent) and the one by Ulrik Ingerslev Uggerhøj, Physics and Astronomy (http://science.au.dk/en/news-and-events/news-article/artikel/forskere-fra-au-og-dtu-viser-at-partikler-fra-rummet-skaber-skydaekke/ ) and the ones by several others to numerous to cite here (Google them) showing that particles from space affect cloud cover. In fact the AGW left-wing-nuts crowd call the findings ridiculous and un-verifiable. Well, why did it work in my science fair project way back in 1956 when I showed the traces given off by a radioactive source?. Have the laws of physic changed? Again, I am no expert, but from my reading the various studies, the number of these particles striking the earth has a direct, verifiable, correlation to the solar magnetic activity. This article does a good job of explaining why the AGW left-wing-nuts ignore this correlation.
Next we need to consider the heating effects of the spinning magnet inside earth. If you are not familiar with the heating effect of a motor or generator, than, take a magnet that has a hole in the center, place a shaft in this hole and put it in the chuck of a drill. Spin this magnet within the field of another magnet. The magnet will get warm. Now, how much heat is being added to the earth/ground/soil/ocean (the ocean is conductive and will be affected by rotating/oscillating magnetic flux.) There could even be some effect upon the atmosphere. Where is the consideration for this effect? How is it affected by the Moon, Sun, other planets, and the galaxy we are in? How much heat is added by the flux lines cutting through the Earth and the fluctuation/perturbation of these lines caused by other bodies in space? Is anyone even looking at it?
So I ask, how can the science be settled? Why do the AGW left-wing-nuts crowd get to quell any report, study or talk that is counter to their opinion? Where is the free, scientific discussion? Consider all of the questions rhetorical, no response required.

> There must be something wrong on the side of WUWT?
> (the notify me of follow-up comments does not work)

My guess is that the Email doesn’t go out until a moderator approves the message.

Personally, I think you’re nuts to want notification of every comment in an active thread, but I suppose it could be an easy way to have a program maintain current statistics about who’s commenting in a thread.

Late Beck’s interpretation of the data was wrong: most of the wet chemical data were from samples taken over land, in towns, fields and forests. These are worthless for any knowledge of what the real CO2 levels were in that period. Then, like now, the best available data were obtained over the oceans, on ships and coastal with wind from the seaside. These data are all around the ice core data.

Smokey says:
February 22, 2012 at 10:27 am
“The question is, what is Connolley getting out of posting his misrepresentations here?”

Material for his own blog to quote. He didn’t try once to refute what I said. He actually never answers me. I guess I’m talking over his head.

Dirk:

Don’t underestimate William’s intelligence, or his strong grasp of the facts. Instead, follow Steve McIntyre’s advice and watch the pea. Pay particular attention to his misdirections. When he tries to drag the conversation in one direction, look to where he is moving the conversation away from. Note that the entire original post was about what the climate models do. Rather than addressing this by saying “NO climate models DO look at solar variability” he states that the IPCC report mentioned solar variability. Two very different things. At no time does he try to question the assertion of the 0.5 to 0.8 coefficient of correlation, hence he misdirects from the underlying premise. He asserts that the last 100 years belie this. Yet he doesn’t provide a link relating temperature to solar variability, such as sunspots. A quick check of google scholar shows a number of papers discussing this. Don’t take my word for it, but it is known that the surface temperature reacts faster to increases in sunspots than decreases. As such, we are just now beginning to see the effects of the reduced solar activity. One piece of evidence is the pause in the increase in sea level. Another is the bloody cold weather. But that’s only weather.

Reading the comments, I would caution many to not miss the main point of Mr. Rawls paper. The statistical relevence of omission of an important variable in any analysis. If logic tells us there is even a probable causal relationship we must take a look at that variable. If there is a correlation, then it must be included. The old “hem lines vs stock market levels” test is a good one for the logic part of the argument.

William Connelly, how does AR-4 explain the 23 cycles of warming followed by cooling that have been found in the paleoclimatic record? Why is there cosmogenic isotope changes at each of the past warming and cooling phases? The following is an excerpt from my comment that has links to papers.

Astley:
William Connelly would be interested in your or your cohorts’ answers to these questions.
Those promoting the extreme AGW paradigm appear to selectively ignore and filter research and data. It is necessary to have a logical/scientific explanation for all observations. The logical process and fundamental rules is similar to criminal scene investigation. What does the evidence show? It is not appropriate or logical to ignore observations or filter observations to promote a specific hypothesis.

This graph shows past Dansgaard-Oesgher or Bond cycles. Note there are cycles in the paleoclimatic record of warming followed by cooling of high latitude Northern regions (Gerald Bond has able to track 23 of these cycles through the Holocene interglacial and into the last glacial cycle). In the 20th century there was also warming of high latitude Northern regions. The past warming and cooling cycles all correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes. There is no correlation with atmospheric CO2 changes. There is no correlation to changes in the North Atlantic drift current and these cycles. Correlation and/or the lack of correlation is a fundamental issue that must be explained by the hypothesis.

What is your or the Realclimate or the AR4 explanation of the past warming and cooling cycles? What caused the warming followed by cooling? Magic wand? Why is there again and again correlation of the warming and cooling cycles with large changes in cosmogenic isotopes? (Changes in cosmogenic isotopes are caused by changes in the solar heliosphere or changes in the geomagnetic field.)

There appears to some sort of spooky filtering mechanism that distorts and blocks the research related to solar modulation of planetary clouds by electroscavenging (Solar wind bursts. There is more than one mechanism by which solar changes modulate planetary cloud cover.) from reaching the IPCC produced documents or the Realclimate threads on solar modulation of planetary clouds.

Based on the below graph that shows cycles of warming followed by cooling some of which are abrupt cooling periods (there is another mechanism that is also solar driven that is causing the abrupt cooling cycles such as the Younger Dryas or the past interglacial terminations) and the fact that currently the magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots is decaying linearly and the sun will soon no longer be capable of producing sunspots what do you think will happen next? What is the lesson of the past telling us?

(See figure 3 from Richard Alley’s paper that is copied in the above link. Excerpt from the above link.)
Fig.3. The upper panel shows the air temperature at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, reconstructed by Alley (2000) from GISP2 ice core data. The time scale shows years before modern time, which is shown at the right hand side of the diagram. The rapid temperature rise to the left indicate the final part of the even more pronounced temperature increase following the last ice age. The temperature scale at the right hand side of the upper panel suggests a very approximate comparison with the global average temperature (see comment below). The GISP2 record ends around 1855, and the red dotted line indicate the approximate temperature increase since then. The small reddish bar in the lower right indicate the extension of the longest global temperature record (since 1850), based on meteorological observations (HadCRUT3). The lower panel shows the past atmospheric CO2 content, as found from the EPICA Dome C Ice Core in the Antarctic (Monnin et al. 2004). The Dome C atmospheric CO2 record ends in the year 1777.

“And lest someone say, “but the build-up of heat in the oceans due to the “energy imbalance”; it is obvious that there must be warming”: My answer would be : if the climate system worked in such a simplistic way, WHY USE SUPERCOMPUTERS AT ALL if that is so easy? Again, a grossly expensive and illogical enterprise!”

DirkH – I agree with you about GCMs and modeling. Many topics could be discussed (i.e. governing equations, stability of the numerical schemes, well-posedness, BCs, ICs, source terms…). Unfortunately, if anyone brings up anything remotely technical about numerical modeling, supposedly well-informed visitors like Mr. Connolley head for the hills. I always try though, but it usually ends with something like “our climate models are great, look how accurate they are, we need more money for supercomputers…”. [Sigh]

P.S. I’m STILL waiting for someone to point me to a document where all of the equations used in NASA GISS Model E are written down. Just the governing equations for all of the physics. Forget the numerical methods for the time being (which are even more important). Sadly, no one has taken me up on that…not even at NASA (Gavin has to blog, you know).

I finally get a chance to check the comments on my post and find… a William Connolley acting very much like the William Connolley of Wikipedia infamy.

My first question is, did this guy actually read my AR5 review, which charges the IPCC with neglecting all solar variables other than Total Solar Insolation (TSI)?

Connolley cites a bunch of AR4 sections that supposedly rebut my charge, but as anyone who has examined AR4 already knows, the only solar effect given any weight in AR4 is TSI.

Connolley cites the AR4 section on pre-industrial climate change, where the language is perfectly clear. It refers to “changes in solar radiation.” That is TSI, the sun’s output of electromagnetic radiation.

He also cites AR4 section 9.4.1.5, which refers to “solar forcing” such as ” the solar forcing reconstruction by Hoyt and Schatten (1993).” Sounds a bit more propitious, like it COULD refer to forcings beyond TSI, but no. Hoyt and Schatten (1993) is a TSI reconstruction, as are all the other solar forcings considered in this section.

Another connolley comment cites AR4’s FAQ9.2: “Can the Warming of the 20th Century be Explained by Natural Variability?”

The only solar variable considered here is “solar output,” or TSI. Could it be that Mr. Connolley is getting confused by the fact that this section does refer to the solar cycle, making it seem that they must be accounting the possible effects of the solar magnetic variation that occurs over this cycle?

Solar output has an 11-year cycle and may also have longer-term variations.

But “solar output” is very specific. It refers only to Total Solar Insolation. That is, electromagnetic radiation only. So its pretty clear that Connolley knows he is citing a bunch of references to TSI effects only.

He even quotes a sentence referring to a particular solar reconstruction:

“In addition, a combined analysis of the response at the surface and through the depth of the atmosphere using HadCM3 and the solar reconstruction of Lean et al. (1995) …”

Surely he is aware that this is a TSI reconstruction.

In short, he is engaging in the exact same omitted variable fraud that my review documents in AR5. He is simply citing AR4’s pretense to have fully considered solar effects when it only considered TSI effects. To put the cherry on top, after citing a bunch of TSI only references to rebut the claim that the IPCC only looking at TSI, Connolley asks: “how do you explain the author’s apparent ignorance of the AR4?”

Poor Wikipedia, again afflicted by this Vesuvius of disinformation.

Connolley also claims that my post fails to address recent warming. Again, did he actually read the review? It contains an extended discussion of the IPCC’s lunatic claims that recent warming (by which they mean from the late 70’s to the late 90’s) cannot be attributed to high 20th century solar activity because the level of this activity remained steady (at very high levels) over the second half of the century.

And he says that he wants to see “recent” papers on the recent warming. Is he aware that there has been no warming since the late 90’s for anyone to write about? The MOST recent temperature trend is flat. But more fundamentally, he seems to be claiming that we should only look at NEW research that has come out since AR4, presumably on the grounds that AR4 was authoritative on all the research up to 2007. But as noted in the first post-script, AR4 perpetrated the exact same omitted variable fraud that AR5 is perpetrating (something I documented at the time in submitted comments on the AR4 draft).

Connolley even calls me a liar for saying that the AR5 draft specifies that the warming effect of CO2 is 40 times stronger than the warming effect of solar variation over the 1750-2010 period: “Yes, but he just made it up. It isn’t true. You’ll notice he provides no evidence for the claim.”

I agreed not to quote the AR5 draft, but I did provide a link to the equally ludicrous ratio of 14 to 1 used in AR4. (The exact number is 13.833.) Does Connolley want to call that a lie too? The raw evidence (solar climate correlations vs. CO2 climate correlations) says that the sun is the much stronger driver, yet the IPCC assumes that CO2 has many times the warming effect of solar variation. In for a penny in for a pound apparently. The exact AR5 FOD ratio is 39.857. And I’ve actually looked at it.

I said
“If we are then still going to add clouds (which is acknowledged in Wikipedia as a factor below these figures) then water vapor and clouds will probably be like 99% and CO2 <1%, agreed?'

In fact, all the clouds in the atmosphere are massive
I think it would be probably more like CO2 having an effect of <0.01% por <0.001%
contributing to the GH effect.
In fact, there was no GH effect I could establish at all, of an increase in GHG's causing warming,

“”””” The MMGWCCC set like to point out the power of CO2 in the 15 micron absorption band, to warm the earth. Well of course it does warm the atmosphere, which is a far cry from warming the earth; the Sun does that. Well strictly speaking, the sun provides earth with boundless supplies of perfectly good radiant energy. Earth chooses to waste the vast majority of it thereby creating the waste “heat” energy that warms us.

Now the all powerful CO2 is well known to fail in its attempts to “warm” the earth, or keep it warm, when there isn’t any cloud (at night) and/or not much warming water vapor either. sans clouds or H2O vapor, earth cools rapidly after sundown; notwithstanding the rising concentrations of CO2.

Maybe there’s a reason for this. Let’s not make the mistake of denying that CO2 captures some of the LWIR emitted from the earth surface. Every time one of those CO2 molecules captures a 15 micron photon, it picks up a whopping 85 milli electron Volts of energy (roughly), which it usually thermalizes to warm the atmosphere .More of this CO2 and you get more atmospheric warming from 15 micron LWIR. The CO2 could also capture some 4 micron LWIR to do its assymmetrical stretch; but sadly the earth surface doesn’t emit much of that to capture; and either does the sun. Well only 1% of solar spectrum energy lies at 4 microns and longer. Too bad because those would be about 320 meV photons, with nearly 4 times the warming potential ( of the atmosphere).

But then that would be a surface cooling effect and hence negative feedback cooling.

Evidently CO2 is also IR active (don’t know how) at around 2.17 microns, which would be around 590 neV photons worth of surface cooling. feedback.

H2O on the other hand is near IR active at around 750-760 nm, where the solar photon energy is more like 1.68 eV. There’s also virtually always far more H2O molecules in the atmosphere than CO2, and each time one of them grabs a 760 nm photon, it captures 20 times as much photon energy as does a CO2 molecule at 15 microns.
That of course is a very large surface cooling effect, since that energy will never make it to 700 metres or so depth; well the 760 doesn’t go that deep anyway, but it does go far below the surface layer where all of the CO2 returned LWIR photons are stopped, and tend to cause more evaporation, than ocean warming.

It should be fairly obvious that H2O is far more suited to warming the atmosphere, and simultaneously cooling the ocean, than is CO2, by a long way.

The likelihood that earth would be a frozen ice ball, sans CO2, so long as the oceans remain, seems pretty remote to me. Clearly H2O is better suited to keeping us warm (from the air) than CO2 can ever be. And if you look at all of the water bands under 4 microns, you can see than the 760 nm absorption is but a small piece of the story. Water is most absorbing at 3.0 microns, and gives virtually total extinction of incoming 3 micron radiation.

Notwithstandig any of Myrrh’s protestations, photons of any wavelength at all, can be wasted, and turned into ocean warming “heat.”

UzUrBrain says
I spent several years developing computer models of nuclear power plants for the analysis of the required Nuclear Regulatory Commission accidents and the analysis of several significant accents.

According to what I find it is plain and simplein the long term sun doesn’t input extra energy required, but it does have critical effect on the distribution of the energy already absorbed by the world oceans.

From the original post: My training is in economics where we are very familiar with what statisticians call “the omitted variable problem” (or when it is intentional, “omitted variable fraud”). Whenever an explanatory variable is omitted from a statistical analysis, its explanatory power gets misattributed to any correlated variables that are included.

This is an excellent summary of what is wrong with the N&Z paper, they deliberately omit the surface heat capacity in their model which distorts the temperature distribution and calculation of their Tgb which underlies the whole paper. Anyone who mentions it is ignored by them, as a result the deficit due to assuming zero surface heat capacity is instead attributed to Pressure!

I don’t think that Connolley or anyone else should be banned here, unless they are a persistent troll or try to keep diverting the topic, in which case their name should stay together with a moderator’s comment. I see that Peter Gleick is complaining that he is banned at WUWT. Is that true?

[REPLY: That is categorically untrue. -REP]
Reply 2: REP was mistaken. I banned Gleick last year for repeated use of the “d” word. REP didn’t know. ~ ctm

>Firstly, I’m reading the WGI report, which doesn’t make any policy recommendations. WGII and III are more policy-focussed, but even then I’m not sure you’re right.

I was not aware that we were debating an individual working group. You asserted that one of the posters here made up the fact that the IPCC supports the notion of CAGW. I used WGIII to refute that notion completely. For you to refer now to WGI, and attempt to limit debate to that document is a very poor argument indeed.

>Secondly, you seem to think in rather all-or-nothing terms: in your world, either GW is catastrophic, and we do stuff, or it is non-catastrophic, and we do nothing. That is clearly unrealistic.

No, I have never advocated doing nothing. The main thing we should do is study. Not pontificate, not censor data and obfuscate in the face of FOI requests. But if it’s not catastrophic, however confusing that simple word may seem to you, it isn’t worth worrying about; we have real issues facing humanity to deal with that are catastrophic. There are famines in the world. Those people need fed. Producing less energy in some ephemeral attempt to control the climate is not going to help feed those people. Paying billions to scientists to prove its (AGW) happening isn’t going to feed those people. Your side is backed into the corner on this; if the IPCC doesn’t support the notion that its catastrophic, there is no reason for the policies they are promoting. If you do not believe it’s catastrophic you have no valid argument whatsoever, and most of what you posted on wikipedia is entirely disingenuous.

>> Why is there such heated debate, if they believe there is no threat involved

>Because there is a threat; but it might not be “catastrophic”, depending of course on what that ill-defined word might mean to you.

Let me get this straight; Global Warming might be bad, just not bad enough to be called catastrophic? It’s certainly portrayed that way in the mainstream media. Hansen and Mann have certainly made public predictions which can only be described as catastrophic. Are you suggesting the scientific communities consensus is that we should hamstring our economy and limit development to prevent that which is merely unfavorable? By that logic we would have outlawed cars after about the first year. Once someone realized people could die in a traffic accident we should have outlawed them entirely. Hmmm . . . . nanny state much?

If you want to hinge this argument on the gray area between that which is merely harmful and that which is catastrophic, and stand on the notion that the IPCC has never used that particular word, I suggest you are being deliberately obtuse. You know very well what that word means, and you know full well the scenarios depicted by the IPCC fulfill that word completely, nevermind the overactive imaginations of people like Mike Mann and James Hansen.

So, Bill, you are either denying your cause (Alarmist activism in the name of CAGW), or you are being entirely disingenuous.

To accuse others of making stuff up because they used the word catastrophic in relation to IPCC prognostications is really thin soup. If that’s all you’ve got left, you’ve lost the debate. And mother nature ain’t even started yet.

I accuse you of intellectual dishonesty today, right here on this board. It is prima facia true. Res Ipsa Loquitor. No one to blame for that but yourself.

And yet my vote is that you stay. Fascism has a home in this argument. Let it not find one on our side. Those convinced by your comments are the easily swayed, and will come to the truth once they realize they are standing, nearly alone, with the crazed believers, hucksters and charlatans.

Alec, you’re missing the whole point of the IPCC, to syphon money from the poor in rich countries, to the rich in poor countries.
Chapter authors & the IPCC hierachy, are appointed with this process in mind. Anything that detracts from the (on)message, that it’s the evil capitalist, western, colonialists, who are despoiling our world by their selfish actions, is to be studiously excluded, or at worst, ignored.
We’ve seen Steve Mc’s efforts to shine a light into the paleoclimatology arena, are met with at best a comment of “Noted”, or at worst, threats to have his participation in the IPCC process suspended.
The paricipation of the off-message in this process, is being grudgingly accepted and presented as the IPCC inviting participation of “The Dark Side”, thus demonstrating that they aren’t biased.
The reality is, that such participation will be marginalised. This will continue, until another way of syphoning money off, can be developed & marketed.

The CO2 hypothesis lost credibility when it failed to explain the incontrovertible evidence of preindustrial sustained temperature cycles. Regardless of Hansen and Mann’s attempts to hide the same , historical accounts are clear and more evidence is pouring in from new studies in the Southern Hemisphere.

I am aware that this is off topic as far as Alex Rawl’s post is concerned, but the continued input from William Connolly prompts me to ask him what his views are rather than continually interpreting what the “scientific consensus of climate” says, so that us cerebrally challenged sceptics can understand the truth.

My question is whether he believes that there is a tipping point beyond which global temperatures will escalate out of control?

To Alec Rawls:
You are fully on the right track to uncover the IPCC scam, which is based on
(1) Omitted variable fraud
(2) only use of the TSI-value, which itself, changes little….
(3) the lie in AR4-wg1-chapter 2: ‘The Earth’s orbit has no effect on millenium scale…
i.e. the Earth’s orbit is only a “INVARIANT Boundary condition”…..

I made a AR4-error complaint and surprizingly they agreed with my view about the
orbit but, without any explanation or references, the TSU just said:” We see no action warranted….”
As you can read in my booklet: The Earth’s orbit does the Increasing/Decreasing
action of the Solar OUTPUT received on Earth…which is seen in paleodata…it is not the TSI…
The IPCC maintains, the Solar Output TSI is next to constant…. fine….but
the Earth’s orbit determines, HOW MUCH of the OUTPUT actually reaches the top of the atmosphere and thus determining Earth’s temps and climate….seen in your quoted
paleostudies…..
…… To the Orbit, which is being kept silent on: The orbit is not a line-shaped
flight, as you would draw with a pencel on a piece of paper…. the real flight cannot be drawn on
a flat surface, since it is a 3-D-spirallic flight around its spiral center (mean progressive line or
path around the Sun) ….. this is the OMITTED VARIABLE FRAUD, the flight SPIRAL is the omitted variable…….
……..and if someone checks the online “NASA JPL Horizon” solar system parameters, he would find that this fraud is present is even there: By not giving a hint nor any size of daily varying spiral diameters of real Earth’s trajectory…
….. details on the spiral flight only see German Amazon.de ISBN 978-3-86805-604-4, all
transparently calculated…..Alec, please have a look and you will fully agree….
………..as I with your analysis.
Cheers…….JS

Being wrong is one thing. Being Connelly is both: that and something else. It’s the latter that qualifies him for the Boot. Boot Connelly for life from here!!!! …………………………………….. Please.

All those in favour say Ey

I pass. This is Anthony’s blog, it is not a democracy. Anthony has been consistent in letting those with opposing views post here until it’s clear they’re pushing their own agenda or start disagreeing disagreeably.

In Connelley’s case, many people here remember reports of updates to Wikipedia pages reverted by Connelley within minutes, I think this is a good opportunity to study the beast in an environment he can’t edit. With luck, Connelley will learn something about how he sullied Wikipedia as a reference tool. By the way William, see the reference pages up at the top nav bar? I think you deserve some of the credit for them.

Or it could be that he’s here because he can’t reach us at Wikipedia any more.
—————————————————————————–
Okay, I defer this measure to a latter date. Mr. Rawl’s rebuttal is brilliant, prescient and precise and gets off the Clownish detours initiated by Connelly. If we have to follow the clowinsh detours in the first place so be it, but i’m not convinced they are necessary. Notice in Rawl’s rebuttal we see the same defects in Connelly’s personality cloud everything Connelly says (and probably does). H/T to Mr. Rawls.

You only have to read the UN’s Agenda 21 to see exactly why they are all about blaming climate on man. It’s all about crippling progress, destroying industry, devolving society, eradicating religion, reducing population down to less than a billion, and returning to an agrarian existence, mostly subsistence.

The gob-stopping part of the Agenda 21’s text is that it is SOOOO touchy feely, all about Gaia and giving nature more value than humans, doing medicine by shaman and spiritualist—forget longevity, it’s a passing fad. They are loony enough to claim that a condition in which everybody has exactly the same everything and all take care of everybody—pure, radical, extreme socialism—is a condition of LOVE. Only in such a state can love be realized

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the UN LOVES us. Sure, rriigghhtt!!

What we have in the UN is the 1960s hippies, now adult and assuming power, trying to convert the world to a commune.

How many Muslims are there in the world? I’ll bet they will react violently when told that they have to lose their religion. I want to be a fly on the wall for that!

Note in Rawl’s rebuttal we see the same defective personhood of Connelley calling Rawls a liar when it is apparent Connolley has no grounds to say so. Connolley isn’t batting for Science here; he’s batting for his demented personhood to have a relevant voice. Don’t believe me?
From Rawl’s rebuttal

‘….Connolley even calls me a liar for saying that the AR5 draft specifies that the warming effect of CO2 is 40 times stronger than the warming effect of solar variation over the 1750-2010 period: “Yes, but he just made it up. It isn’t true. You’ll notice he provides no evidence for the claim.”

I agreed not to quote the AR5 draft, but I did provide a link to the equally ludicrous ratio of 14 to 1 used in AR4. (The exact number is 13.833.) Does Connolley want to call that a lie too? The raw evidence (solar climate correlations vs. CO2 climate correlations) says that the sun is the much stronger driver, yet the IPCC assumes that CO2 has many times the warming effect of solar variation. In for a penny in for a pound apparently. The exact AR5 FOD ratio is 39.857. And I’ve actually looked at it….’

William Connelly:
> These two correlations with temperature change give rise to the two main competing theories
No. That seems to be a common misconception, but the theories start with the physical processes, not with the correlations.

This sets the tone of your response, which is essentially a critique of procedure ignoring substance. The detailed history of how these two competing theories arose (they didn’t both arise in the same way) is suitable content for a history book, not a scientific article. Alex Rawls isn’t writing a history book. He merely, as is usual in science, draws a general link from the two observed correlations to the two competing theories. That general link is good enough for scientists to see his point and we would not care to see it expanded upon. It is unimportant to the science.

Usoskin says nothing about climate, and presents no figures that allow you to see what has happened in the 20th C – the scale shown is too large.

That is because he is talking about the sun. He doesn’t have to make a link to climate.

… nothing new there …
… All you’ve written could have been … written about IPCC AR4. …

This is a critique of process not of substance. Science isn’t the law. You don’t get to exclude evidence on procedural grounds because it should have been brought up at some earlier stage or missed some arbitrary deadline.

” Your honour – we object to the introduction of this evidence that solar cycles influence climate. It was improperly obtained as the Earth wasn’t read its Miranda rights first. We also argue that it is too late to introduce this evidence at this late stage of the trial. We therefore move that it be excluded on procedural grounds”.

And since you haven’t actually addressed any of the attribution arguments for 20th C change they gave there, all this is besides the point.

“Objection Mr Chairman – we already have a motion on the table that must be discussed first.”

The trouble is that nobody else knows about your strange procedural rules and I have a sneaking suspicion you are making them up as we go along. Why should we confine ourselves to your procedural straightjacket?

This Rawls review is a brilliant piece of writing, and is good enough to be used in colleges as an example of high-quality essaying.

I don’t know enough physics to have a technical opinion, except to say that if the evidence for solar impact on temperature is what Rawls says, then his analysis is a very valuable public service and is to be commended.

George E. Smith; says:
February 22, 2012 at 11:43 ambut sadly the earth surface doesn’t emit much of that to capture; and either does the sun. Well only 1% of solar spectrum energy lies at 4 microns and longer.

I call BS on that. It is simply illogical. The hotter something is the more thermal infrared it emits, an incandescent lightbulb emits 95% heat and 5% visible light. That’s around the right proportion from the Sun.

Switch on a stove, it first begins giving off thermal infrared, heat, before you see any colour – the hotter it gets the more heat it gives off, even as it begins to glow with colour it is still giving off more and more heat.

B.S. This heat, this great thermal energy from the Sun to the Earth is what we feel as heat, because that is what it is, it is the thermal energy of Sun that we feel.

The Sun’s thermal energy, heat, reaches us in around 8 minutes. We feel this heat, this thermal energy, because our bodies are evolved to absorb it, through our water content, resonant vibration. Just as we feel a fire’s thermal energy, its heat radiating to us and warming us up inside.

Notwithstandig any of Myrrh’s protestations, photons of any wavelength at all, can be wasted, and turned into ocean warming “heat.”

Codswallop. It takes the large, pinhead size, thermal infrared to move water molecules, visible is transmitted through water without being absorbed, not even by electrons, that’s what transmitted means, water is a transparent medium for visible light.

As for carbon dioxide’s absorption spectrum, since it is fully part of the water cycle then as it spontaneously joins with water vapour it too will release any heat in the colder heights and come down as rain as the water vapour condenses out to ice or water. All pure clean rain is carbonic acid. The water cycle cools the Earth from the 67°C it would be without water – think deserts to get an idea of what the Earth would be like with our atmosphere but without water.

Any “heating” of the atmosphere that the miniscule trace carbon dioxide does is utterly insignificant against the great cooling cycle of the greenhouse gas water.

My oh my, William Connolley is really riled up today, quickly into the ‘you’re lying’ and ‘you made that up’ accusations.

While doing his level best to frequently state He Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong at Wikipedia, just some differences of opinion, if you really knew how Wikipedia works then you’d see everything he did was all Fine And Dandy. Like he wants everyone possible to know that William Connolley is incapable of doing anything unethical, against the rules, etc.

I’m just wondering out loud here, but was Connolley one of those 16 or so people to whom Peter Gleick sent the fraudulent and fraudulently-obtained Heartland documents? After all I had heard that Connolley does have some sort of anti-skeptic blog on the internet somewhere so it seems natural that Gleick would have sent them to Connolley. Well, providing Gleick considered Connolley’s blog worth noting for the disseminating of the info. The traffic must be pretty low these days if Connolley can spend so much time leaving so many comments here, perhaps hoping someone will click on his name, visit his site, and bask in the absolute perfection of his always-correct intellectual greatness….

Strike two; ‘fraid that you and a small number of others discount easily measurable, quantifiable effects, effects that can even be observed/performed in your own back yard or driveway.

Ye of so little understanding of how dew forms on the grass even … please, give this hobby horse a rest, it doesn’t make any of us look any better for it and give the Connolleys of the world fodder for their blogs …

Mr Connelley comes across as a bit snappy doesn’t he. Also rather surprised he has been welcomed by some considering he links his name in his first post to a piece he wrote where he called anyone who thinks the sun might influence climate a nutter.

[Connolley:] It isn’t. You won’t find the phrase used at all. You just made it up.

Your statement is disingenuous, if not entirely false.

The third paragraph of the IPCC charter dated 6 December 1988 states “Noting with concern that the emerging evidence that the continued growth in atmospheric concentrations of “greenhouse” gases could produce global warming with an eventual rise in sea levels, the effects of which could be disastrous for mankind if timely steps are not taken at all levels.”

Thanks Alec,
This appears to be the first time the IPCC has allowed outside comments in their draft and review process so I hope your post doesn’t discourage them from the practice in the future.

– Why have they increased the ratio to 40 to 1, up from 14 to 1 in AR4?
– The chapter on human and natural temperature forcing factors. Does it include a historic look at the natural recurring wave pattern?
– If they are presenting change in relation to natural recurring patterns, aren’t the missing solar as well as many other variables accounted for in the pattern?

Personally, I don’t see why. He seems to be keeping his comments as civil as a number who visit here. Having said that, I’ve noted that he completely ignores statements where he is proven to be wrong, but I don’t see that as a case for banning either. If anything, he is doing the case for CAGW a disservice by being slapped down so many times, and I see that as a good thing.

[Reply: So long as a commentator follows site Policy, they can post here. ~dbs, mod.]

@William M. Connolley says:
No. That seems to be a common misconception, but the theories start with the physical processes, not with the correlations.
===========================
Correct but misleading. All theories should be grounded in empirical observations but they also include theoretical (unconfirmed) assumptions. That’s why one GCM predicts 2C of warming over 100 years and another predicts 5C.

The important question is what caused the 1970 to 2000 measured warming.
PDO/ ENSO

Most of the “recent” warming, which includes the previous 10-15 years of negative warming, is not real. It is the product of ADJUSTMENTS, sundry statistical shenanigans, and outright fabrication.

I find it truly hilarious that William Connelly suddenly finds himself selling his misinformation on WUWT. Will Peter Gleick show up next? Will skeptical sites become the last refuge of dis-reputed warmists???

>Firstly, I’m reading the WGI report, which doesn’t make any policy recommendations. WGII and III are more policy-focussed, but even then I’m not sure you’re right.

I was not aware that we were debating an individual working group. You asserted that one of the posters here made up the fact that the IPCC supports the notion of CAGW. I used WGIII to refute that notion completely. For you to refer now to WGI, and attempt to limit debate to that document is a very poor argument indeed.”

I would agree, the statement that IPCC is focused on CAGW is on the WGII site’s front page even to this day. For historical note rather use the wayback machine though since IPCC has a tendency to change the wording when their propaganda gets critique.

And why try and debate with a propaganda tool who has already gotten caught red handed? :p

A central claim seems to be that: “The raw evidence (solar climate correlations vs. CO2 climate correlations) says that the sun is the much stronger driver”

I don’t think this strong claim is justified.

The evidence for the claim is woefully inadequate. Some papers are provided to justify this “solar climate correlation” as folllows.

First:

“Bond et al. 2001, “Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene,” Science. Excerpt from Bond: “Over the last 12,000 years virtually every centennial time scale increase in drift ice documented in our North Atlantic records was tied to a distinct interval of variable and, overall, reduced solar output.””

This isn’t global. It’s North Atlantic only. There’s nothing in here that can tell us how much of an correlation, strong or not, the Sun has with global temperature.

Same problem. In fact this one is worse because it’s a smaller area and it’s not even temperature.

Usoskin et. al. 2005, “Solar Activity Over the Last 1150 years: does it Correlate with Climate?” Proc. 13th Cool Stars Workshop.” Excerpt from Usoskin: “The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 — .8 at a 94% — 98% confidence level.”””

The reported solar-temperature correlation is with the Mann hockey stick! If you don’t accept the Mann hockey stick then you *can’t* accept Usoskin’s claimed correlation. In fact it would work in opposition to the claim since now we have solar data not correlating with temperature.

Additionally Usoskin 2005 also ends with: “Note that the most recent warming, since around 1975, has not been considered in the above correlations. During these last 30 years the total solar irradiance, UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source”

“Shaviv and Veizer, 2003, “Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate?” GSA Today.”
Excerpt from Shaviv: “We find that at least 66% of the variance in the paleotemperature trend could be attributed to CRF [Cosmic Ray Flux] variations likely due to solar system passages through the spiral arms of the galaxy.” [Not strictly due to solar activity, but implicating the GCR, or CRF, that solar activity modulates.]”

This is the only one that comes close, but see The end of Usoskin for example. Do cosmic rays correlate with recent warming?

This is all woefully inadequate evidence to draw such a strong conclusion that “the sun is the much stronger driver”

“, yet the IPCC assumes that CO2 has many times the warming effect of solar variation.”

The IPCC doesn’t assume that. The forcing from solar and CO2 are calculated from solar observations and radiative physics of CO2, it isn’t an assumption like they just dipped into a hat and pulled out a figure.

Claiming the output of computer climate models is proof or evidence is a fraud. Claiming that skeptics must disprove AGW isn’t true is a fraud. The attempt to eliminate the WMP from climate history is a fraud. Using adjusted data to calculate estimate global temperatures while adjusting historical records downward is a fraud.

While it’s true there’s an omitted variables problem here, there’s also a classical system of equations with endogenous variables problem, in that Temperature T responds to CO2 through the GHG effect, while at the same time CO2 reponds to T through the oceanic outgassing effect. Without some exogenous Instrumental Variables, neither equation is identified.

A workable solution would be to include one (or more) solar variables S in the temperature equation, along with CO2, plus cumulative human Emissions E in the CO2 equation along with T. Ignoring lagged effects, this is a straightforward 2SLS problem. The bottom line is how much E affects T, holding S constant, and this is just a reduced form multiple regression of T on the exogenous variables E and S, with no reference to CO2. Nevertheless, the structural equations are of great interest and should at least be checked to see if the coefficients make sense.

Lagged effects make things more complicated in ways I don’t fully understand, and in any event there will be a lot of serial correlation with near unit roots that weakens all of the significance levels. I’m guessing that E and S both have positive effects, but that doesn’t mean that either will come in as statistically significant after the dynamics are accounted for.

I’m not sure what the best proxy for S is over the last 150 years or so where we have instrumental data — annual sunspot data doesn’t capture the full energy of the sunspot cycle, but perhaps something like a linear interpolation of cyclic peaks might be meaningful. (This would induce serial correlation, but that is not so much of a problem for an explanatory variable as it is for the dependent variable.) 10Be might also be useful instead (or in addition), but I’m not sure what its time resolution is. There is excellent annual data on 14C that is collected to dendrocalibrate radiocarbon dating, but unfortunately it’s contaminated after 1945 by atmospheric testing of nukes, so that it’s not usable in the important recent period of warming and CO2 growth. (14C and 10Be would be excellent candidates for paleo temperature proxies, nevertheless.)

I have no immediate plans to try this, but perhaps others can play with it.

E isn’t completely exogenous, as heating responds to cold while A/C responds to heat. However, these offset one another, and I’m guessing are small in comparison to transportation and manufacturing.

>> Dave Dardinger> Alex Rawls claims that the models assume that CO2 is 40 times as effective as solar (TSI) in terms of climate change.
>> William Connolley said: Yes, but he just made it up. It isn’t true. You’ll notice he provides no evidence for the claim.
> Alex said: [I’m not going to quote the actual numbers, but yeah, the ratio is an astounding 40 to 1, up from 14 to 1 in AR4, which listed total solar forcing as 0.12 W/m^2, vs. 1.66 for CO2.]
> Admittedly Alex didn’t quote the numbers from AR5 in an attempt to stay within the secrecy requirements imposed on the reviewers, but he does list the AR4 numbers. Do you say these are made up?

Alex said “the models assume that CO2 is 40 times as effective as solar” (or, presumably, 14 if we take AR4). That is wrong / made up. “as effective” isn’t right. If he had said “The best estimates for solar and CO2 forcing differ by 14” I wouldn’t have complained. If you want to know *why* those estimates come in (and note that the solar one isn’t well known, so if it has gone down in AR5 I wouldn’t be surprised) then you need to look at the underlying physics. Again, you seem to think this is done by correlation, but it isn’t. It is all written down in AR4, if you care to read it.

> The “total solar forcing” value of .12 W/m^2 is really just a proxy for what might be called the “total solar influence”

Don’t think so. As far as I know, its the best-estimate for solar forcing. It will come from measurements (from the period when we have satellite obs) used to scale sunspot-number (etc) stuff for the pre-satellite era.

> change in cloud cover from cosmic ray influence

It probably doesn’t include that. Not many people (outside places like this) actually believe that stuff.

> many people here remember reports of updates to Wikipedia pages reverted by Connelley within minutes

Do they really? How very exciting. Well, I’ll ask again, can someone provide even one examle of such a thing?

> why are you so snide with people?

I don’t suffer fools gladly.

> Why is there cosmogenic isotope changes at each of the past warming and cooling phases?

I asked for a ref for that. Could you just provide the ref, rather than a link back to a long comment that doesn’t clearly provide the appropriate ref. If you provide a ref, I’ll look at it and comment.

> we are not doing that here, name calling.

Have you not read some of your fellow commenters? They most certainly are.

> If the actual average water vapor content in the air is about 0.5% (it varies around this figure) and CO2 is not more that o.04% then the contribution of CO2 to the GHG effect cannot be more than ca. 8%

> he seems to be claiming that we should only look at NEW research that has come out since AR4, presumably on the grounds that AR4 was authoritative on all the research up to 2007. But as noted in the first post-script, AR4 perpetrated the exact same omitted variable fraud that AR5 is perpetrating

No. I’m pointing out that your entire post here could just has easily have been written about AR4, not AR5. And it would have been much better written about AR4, because then you would have been discussing a publicly available document that we could all easily check. The point about the “new research” was that your post would only have been justified to be about AR5 if there had been any exciting new stuff for you to depend on. But there isn’t.

> Connolley even calls me a liar for saying that the AR5 draft specifies that the warming effect of CO2 is 40 times stronger than the warming effect of solar variation over the 1750-2010 period

> IPCC supports the notion of CAGW. I used WGIII to refute that notion completely

In your own mind, maybe. You said “Given that WGIII (TAR4) concerns itself with mitigation strategies… it would be hard to justify the notion at they (IPCC) don’t view this change as catastrophic. They certainly describe it as such.”

The idea that “concerns itself with mitigation” implies “catastrophic” is just your own. “They certainly describe it as such” appears to be your own invention.

> if the IPCC doesn’t support the notion that its catastrophic, there is no reason for the policies they are promoting

Again, this is just your own overly simplistic all-or-nothing interpretation. The real world isn’t like this.

> It’s certainly portrayed that way in the mainstream media

I hope you aren’t silly enough to get your science from the Meeja. If you are, then please stop at once.

You know, there’s a “free market” alternative to banning – not engaging in protracted discussions with people who are not engaging honestly in the discussion.

The temptation to flame an obvious target (as I’m sure would happen should Gleick show up and start posting here) is overwhelming, but as much as it’s almost the only thing *I’m* good for around here, it’s not really what this place was meant to be about.

I doubt someone like Connnollllly would “go away if ignored,” but less of the discussion would be *about him*, which would cause him considerably more grief than the flames.

(…) Are they ignoring the IR energy given off by the SUN? If the CO2 blocks the IR from leaving the earth doesn’t it block the IR energy from reaching the earth? EVERY graph, chart, pictorial representation I see shows NO IR energy striking the earth. WHY? Please explain.
(…)

What comes from the Sun is short-wave infrared radiation, just outside of the visible spectrum. What the Earth emits and the atmospheric water vapor and CO₂ partially traps is long-wave infrared radiation. The two groups are separate enough that they often aren’t considered together. The short-wave from the Sun just gets lumped in with the “Solar input” figure. See the spectrum graph here, note the separation:http://www.commercialwindows.org/primer_intro.php

Short-wave infrared basically goes right through ordinary window glass, and the atmosphere as well, allowing you to feel the “heat” of the Sun. The long-wave infrared gets virtually totally absorbed and re-emitted, half in and half out, thus ordinary glass is described as opaque to long-wave. The atmosphere is likewise opaque to most long-wave infrared radiation. To learn more about which goes out and which is retained, Ira Glickstein had a nice series of guest posts here on WUWT, Visualizing the “Greenhouse Effect”, start at the second one.

Myrrh says:
February 22, 2012 at 1:05 pmvisible is transmitted through water without being absorbed, not even by electrons, that’s what transmitted means, water is a transparent medium for visible light.
If so, the bottom of the deep oceans should be bathed in bright visible light…
Since it isn’t, codswallop comes to mind…

Some time before he died, James P Hogan (a wonderful, witty, and very intelligent man) and I had a conversation about this very idea, although I think it revolved around discovery of a correlation between magnetic field fluxes in the Sun and the climate on earth.
I proposed to him that our CO2 output was irreversibly damaging the magnetic fields of the Sun, placing us in imminent danger of burning all the planets in a nova. We batted it back and forth for a while.

Suffice it to say that neither of us would put anything past the alarmist fanatics.

It is a great shame that neither James nor Michael Creighton are still here to see the beginnings of vindication becoming widely recognised.

Leif Svalgaard says:
February 22, 2012 at 2:56 pm
Myrrh says:
February 22, 2012 at 1:05 pm
visible is transmitted through water without being absorbed, not even by electrons, that’s what transmitted means, water is a transparent medium for visible light.
If so, the bottom of the deep oceans should be bathed in bright visible light…
Since it isn’t, codswallop comes to mind…
——————————————————————

Leif, you have no grandkids who watch Spongebob Squarepants ?

Seriously though, I have no idea why Myrrh keeps posting this ad nauseam.

Myrrh says:
February 22, 2012 at 1:05 pm
visible is transmitted through water without being absorbed, not even by electrons, that’s what transmitted means, water is a transparent medium for visible light.
“If so, the bottom of the deep oceans should be bathed in bright visible light…
Since it isn’t, codswallop comes to mind…”

Myrrh says:
February 22, 2012 at 1:05 pm
visible is transmitted through water without being absorbed, not even by electrons, that’s what transmitted means, water is a transparent medium for visible light.
If so, the bottom of the deep oceans should be bathed in bright visible light…
Since it isn’t, codswallop comes to mind…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Perhaps it’s cod’s poo (and other pollutants), not codwallop that stops the light getting to the bottom?

Just an observation for those who think Connolley should be blocked from posting:

The biggest problem with his manipulation at wiki was that nobody could argue or dispute anything he was doing. People would update a page, whoosh, the updates were gone.

Here, he has to defend his position because people can actually talk back. He’s not in control of the medium and can’t delete responses.

I don’t know about everyone else, but the breathtaking arrogance is entertaining, and although I’m certain he feels he’s “educating” WUWT regulars, the effect is probably doing him more harm than good. I, for one, welcome the contributions of this guy, he’s demonstrating to everyone who cares to read what the problem is with cAGW people. I personally despise arrogance, it’s the polar opposite of confidence.

And, on topic, I was very impressed with Alec Rawls’ post here, it lays out a coherent and cogent demonstration of something I’ve been saying for a while: since CO2 is clearly not driving climate, since changes have been documented for centuries, a REAL “climate scientist” would be working on explaining those documented changes, not continuing to yammer about a clearly disproved hypothesis.

In my view this post is more important and deserves more attention than the fuss over Dr. Gleick acting the way we expect climate ‘scientists’ to act.

I hope that Alec Rawls’ review of AR5 is picked up by other media outlets and blogs. As FOIA said in his preamble to ClimateGate 2.0 – The money that the climate fraud has siphoned from industry and the public could have been spent instead on clean water, anti-malarial drugs and food for the starving. So instead lets build an emissions trading scheme so traders can make money, lets get huge subsidies to build unreliable windpower…. all based on fraudulent ‘science’…..and a child dies every 5 seconds from hunger

Thank you for a fascinating article, Mr Rawl; what a pleasure to read it…for the third time for me. I like this “Omitted Variable Fraud” fallacy label; it can be detected in other fields too of course, especially in historiography. Nice to have a moniker for the monster.

Like others here, I too noted that our occasional visitor here, Mr William Connolley…the warmists’ well-paid Green guard-dog-on-crack, as I’ve dubbed him…became exercised over your work and attempted to derail and hijack the discussion with his whoppers and sharp-guy pretense. As annoying as such yapping may be, it’s actually very interesting, because it means you’ve hit a nerve and soon enough, hopefully before he takes off again, we’ll find out where. Thanks again for the good read and hoping to see you here more often!

“The fact that WUWT blocked me from adding comments more than a year ago to his routinely biased and often dissembling blog further convinced me that there was little interest in discussion among that group.”

“But I’ve reviewed his tweets, blog posts, status, web URL, and comments and contributions in places like Bishop Hill and WUWT (where, by the way, I’ve been blocked for more than a year from posting comments, presumably because my comments are “incredibly offensive” — yet I’m regularly and personally attacked on these kinds of sites).”

Yeah, I should have mentioned some of Nicola Scafetta’s papers, which he was nice enough to link above. I mostly focussed on the paleo-data and just grabbed what was easiest, since I was pressed for time. When I suggested I could easily come up with another couple of dozen papers, Nicola’s research was certainly something I had in mind.

As for Kirkby, he MIGHT actually be cited somewhere in my review. If so, it would be as “_______”.

William M. Connolley says:
February 22, 2012 at 2:05 pm
==============
“Don’t think so. As far as I know, its the best-estimate for solar forcing.”………..
“It probably doesn’t include that. Not many people (outside places like this) actually believe that stuff.”
“I wrote this in 2004, and it is still about right. I re-iterated it in 2010.”
“Again, this is just your own overly simplistic all-or-nothing interpretation. The real world isn’t like this.’
————-
Glad that has been settled.

“… If the IPCC fails — for the fifth time — to address the scientific weaknesses in the CAGW scenario, after they have been fairly and objectively pointed out in the very critical reports that they have solicited in an admirably open process — then I rather suspect that they will be marginalized and blasted apart,…”

Extremely well written comment and critique of the top article. There have been many of us who have been similarly engaged during the last decade or so. I would not have said for the “fifth time”, but rather the third time since I think solar influence could have been arguable during IPCC2.

It has been clear for a long time that solar influences of some type account for a minimum of 50%, and probably on the order of 80% of temperature changes on Earth. How they work and exactly when they do are very difficult to deconvolute, but the record is clear. People such as WmConnally and Gleick and Mann who continue to stick fingers in their ears and say la-la-la-can’t-hear-you are being schooled right now by ol’Sol (check channel 5 of satellite data today).

As temperatures fall during this decade, due to the now-certain fall in solar activity, the world will rise up in anger against the fraudsters who perpetrated the fraud. If the IPCC actually does perpetrate this omitted variable fraud in IPCC5, it is likely people die due to their willful misdirection. The solar scientists and others who have been vocal (such as this blog) in trying to warn people about the fraud will be vindicated. Those who have perpetrated the fraud will be blamed, and their sentence could well be very severe. Saying “we’re not to blame for fraud because we didn’t understand the mechanism” when the evidence is clearly now all around them will not save them.

> The man who got kicked out of wikipedia for making things up and being found out.

Spreading misinformation doesn’t advance anything useful. I think all commenters are now aware that WMC has been involved with Wikipedia. Can we now resume discussion of the interesting material put forth by Rawls?

…
I pass. This is Anthony’s blog, it is not a democracy. Anthony has been consistent in letting those with opposing views post here until it’s clear they’re pushing their own agenda or start disagreeing disagreeably.

And so Mr. Connelly has (started disagreeing disagreeably), for I personally have caught him stating a number of “factual inexactitudes”–and retorting in a particularly nasty manner when it is obvious he has done so and called out by others.

But so be it.

We can compare Connelly with this Peter Gleick, who isn’t cognizant that what he’s done is wrong, either–both actors will do ANYTHING to justify their nefarious interpretations of reality. Have both ever been edified by anyone else? No, apparently not. Will we have to put up with this Connelly forever? Only until whomever is paying him for this intrusion comes to the conclusion that they aren’t getting even a nickel’s worth of disruption from him.

Then he’ll be gone, never to return.

In fact, they’ll realize he’s doing more damage to “The Cause” than we could ever hope, just like Peter Gleick’s suicidal tendancy to resort to criminal behavior did in his arena–and while it will be temporarily annoying, it serves the greater purpose–in the court of public opinion, CAGW (or DAGW as described above) is a losing cause. And with that goes their money and political influence.

Look, we’ve dispelled everything R. Gates brings up; I don’t see him around anymore. Same with Lazy Teenager–he’s actually fun to correct. We’ve refutted just about everything that “a physicist” has brought up, and he’s not around much anymore (and note these guys avoid all threads on Gleick like they were poisonous–Oh, ya know, there’s been so many threads “poisonous” to their position recently, that may be the reason also).

Whomever is trying to discredit WUWT has apparently called off most of the little dogs and thrust Connelly, their big dog, onto us. It is an act of complete desperation. I also don’t wish this Connelly to be booted, although it is apparent that while he’s been spanked time after time, yet still no neural response gets from his bottom to his cranium. He shows up with a worse attitude than before–spewing more and more garbage that is tossed right back into his face–again with the same response. The whole process is tedious and would be a waste of time were it not so crucial to the argument.

So having read the vast majority of the 267 comments on this thread, I commend Connelly for his tenacity, but his boss is not going to be happy with the results. No way.

Let this continue. It’s there for the whole world to see. Let them be the judge.

Both Rawls and Connolley make testable statements. The value of Rawls post should stand on its own based on testable science value despite the arrogance of Connolley.
In the last 30 years the lower tropospheric global temperature has not changed based on satellite data.
Four Antarctic science stations (Amundsen-Scott, Halley, David and Vostok) independently confirm zero surface warming since the 1950s. These facts conclusively refute any claim that added CO2 causes additional warming at the surface. There are some uncorrupted surface stations around the world to confirm the Antarctic data. There is no “hot spot”

The overwhelming preponderance of observations in Holocene paleoclimatology shows that current temps meander around slightly since the end of the last glacial melting.

The real issue is the corruption of scientific integrity by a minority of political zealots.
If an honest poll of workers trained in the hard sciences were taken you would find that very few agree with the IPCC statements.

Occasionally someone is given a timeout if their posts get out of hand, repeatedly violate policy, discuss subjects not allowed [like HA*RP], become site pests [yawn☺], constantly insult our host or the site, etc.

Gleick might have gotten a timeout, but I don’t recall him ever being banned, and I’ve checked in at least once every day here for five years [WUWT is my home page]. I remember him commenting a lot, almost as much as Connolley does now. Often when someone gets a timeout they go to other blogs screaming about it like spoiled children. Knowing the way Gleick writes on his blog, that might be what happened. [Anthony has given me a timeout once or twice.☺ But I never complained].

If Gleick claims he’s been banned, it’s easy enough for him to post a comment and find out. But that would show one more instance where he’s lying, so I don’t expect him to try.

In my view this post is more important and deserves more attention than the fuss over Dr. Gleick acting the way we expect climate ‘scientists’ to act.

I hope that Alec Rawls’ review of AR5 is picked up by other media outlets and blogs. As FOIA said in his preamble to ClimateGate 2.0 – The money that the climate fraud has siphoned from industry and the public could have been spent instead on clean water, anti-malarial drugs and food for the starving. So instead lets build an emissions trading scheme so traders can make money, lets get huge subsidies to build unreliable windpower…. all based on fraudulent ‘science’…..and a child dies every 5 seconds from hunger

You’ve likely hit upon the main reason Connelly has made such a fuss over it, Ian. Hey, they only respond with venom when something near and dear to them is in jeopardy, and this is DEVASTATING to their cause, particularly in light of recent research results debunking CO2. And, in my humble opinion, why every one of those DAGW actors should be charged with crimes against humanity–although most would probably plead insanity.

It also hastens a downward spiral that eventually loosens their clutches on the political aspect of command and control, which is what it was all intended to be in the first place.

Peter Gleick claims he’s been banned or “blocked” repeatedly on WUWT, whereas WUWT claims categorically that this is not the case. Hmmmm, let me think about who to believe here….

Ok, I’d say Pete’s claim should maybe be verified. Judging by the quality of his, er… administrative… work with scanners and PDF files, Pete’s not an IP maven and my guess is he doesn’t know such bans or blocks would be recorded on the server logs. Asking Peter to narrow down a few dates for his alleged attempts might be quite entertaining.

[REPLY: Anthony replied earlier:

REPLY: Dr. Gleick is not “banned” only put into the moderation que (what we call the “troll bin”) for extra attention due to his often vitriolic commentary that might not meet our policy. It simply gives the moderation team a chance to separate his comments from the daily firehose of comments at WUWT so we can determine if it meets policy, and if so approve it. I’ve explained this to him in a comment on Judith Curry’s website here:

That’s true, she does not. And Dr. Gleick, you aren’t banned from WUWT, just in what we call the “troll bin” for bad behavior, your comments may be approved if they meet policy. Like Dr. Curry, I try to maintain decorum.

You are welcome to submit a comment on WUWT, in fact, I’ll take it one stpe further. I will give you a guest post slot where you can point by point explain your reasoning about why Ms. Laframboise’s book is “full of lies”.

Please let me know when you’d like to guest post.

He never took me up on the offer.

This doesn’t seem to matter to him or to anyone that would rather say how “terrible” I am for “banning” Dr. Gleick. More hate, less filling. – Anthony

At NothingSettledNothingCertain.com, you can see a small report of 1930-2010 in the Central UK, with deconstruction of max temperature as a function of varying bright sunhine duration and PDO/AMO input. CO2 has at most a 0.1C/century window, which could also be UHIE.

Oh, wait, perhaps it is because there was no measured warming at all, so that the entire period confounds the CO_2-only hypothesis, with last month’s lower troposphere 33-year mean anomaly negative once again.

Actually, the most compelling arguments are the ones with the longest time base, not the shortest. To discuss the causes of any local warming or cooling trend, it helps to know the long timescale natural variability of the system. It then helps to regulate your explanations of the local trend with the possible causes of the observed natural variability.

Clearly the lack of warming post 2000 is a big problem for the GHG Forcings theory. A much bigger problem than its proponents will admit.

In science, there are 2 ways to challenge a theory. One is to produce evidence that contradicts the predictions of the theory. The other is to produce evidence that is better explained by a competing theory (or produce a new theory that better explains the evidence).

Solar correlations isn’t a theory. A theory has to propose physical mechanisms. Solar correlations could be evidence for a theory, But in itself isn’t a scientific theory.

The paper says,

Note that it is not necessary to invoke any theory.

I agree. But in the sense, we should conclude that we don’t know what was the primary cause of the 1970-2000 warming. The evidence isn’t there to conclude it was GHGs or solar effects.

This was the point I made earlier and the authors main point. The IPCC’s fallacy is to conclude, that because it isn’t solar, or x or y, It therefore must be GHGs.

A quick note from no other source (ironically enough) than Wikipedia [http://tinyurl.com/7fryd7m]:

Wire Fraud
18 U.S.C. § 1343 provides:
Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

I don’t know Gleick, but I’ve read his confession of wire fraud, and if I were facing up to 20 years of Federal time I’d be sweating pretty hard right about now.

Since we now know you’re not banned from commenting here, Mr. Gleick . . . any comment?

Or shall you just plead the 5th? Yeah, I guess that would be most prudent, wouldn’t it.

I doubt Leif remembers but Jan Pompe made a simulated electronic model of our energy balance system.
I helped a little in suggesting leakage & various capacitance and resistance variables but Jan did most of the work.
The resulting temperature graph was very similar to the historic temperature record. Yes we used data from Leifs pages!

This is a most entertaining thread, just for the processes on display:

– lead article well set out, replete with links and carefully made arguments
– the key contrarian thesis – that we Know All the Processes involved – is open to the ancient Greek charge of Hubris (I’m certainly not qualified to comment scientifically).
– the number of tropes employed – ad-hominem and ad-Ignorantium to name but two – is a wonderful example to students of logic and philosophy. Perhaps AW or the intrepid moderators should tag them as such?
– common taters do seem to fall hard for the trolls – but hey, what an education!

jaymam says:
February 22, 2012 at 4:19 pm
jaymam says:
February 22, 2012 at 12:09 pm
… I see that Peter Gleick is complaining that he is banned at WUWT. Is that true?
[REPLY: That is categorically untrue. -REP]

OK. So is Gleick a liar, or trying to post using the name of a Heartland board member?

Reasonable question. Was he banned posting as “Gleick” or under some other name/alias?

If he was banned because be was violating the board’s policies, then welcome to the real world, Peter or whoever you were/are here.

I never ceases to amaze when someone violates a board’s Policy, Rules, TOS, etc. and gets banned and then whines, wherever folks will listen, about being banned.

The evidence for the claim is woefully inadequate. Some papers are provided to justify this “solar climate correlation” as folllows.”

OK nomnom, William Connelly will not answer these questions. Perhaps you can represent the extreme AGW paradigm and explain how the paleoclimate record and current observations supports the extreme AGW paradigm, rather than the assertion that the sun if responsible for at least 75% of the 20th century warming and the planet is about to abruptly cool.

How does AR-4 explain the 23 cycles of warming followed by cooling that have been found in the paleoclimatic record? Why are there cosmogenic isotope changes at each of the past warming and cooling phases?

The following is link to my comments that has links to papers and more details. Note I include papers that explain the mechanism and show planetary cloud cover correlates with both GCR intensity and changes to the global electric circuit caused by the solar wind bursts that remove cloud forming ions, by the process that is called electroscavenging. Note I am quoting published papers.

Why is there no mention of electroscavenging over at Realclimate? Selective filtering of science?

Those promoting the extreme AGW paradigm and AR4 appear to selectively ignore and filter research and data, that does not support their paradigm. The planet has repeated warmed and cooled with greater warming at northern higher latitudes. i.e. Exactly what we are currently observing.

See this link. Big picture, figure 3, which shows Greenland ice sheet temperatures over the last 12,000 years. Note the cyclic increases and decreases of high latitude temperatures which correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes. Note AR-4 specifically notes this cyclic warming and cooling cannot be explained by CO2 changes or by ocean current changes.

Its the sun. Its the sun. Its the sun. Who will be the first extreme AGW high profile scientist to break ranks? When will the media take notice? When will the public start looking for scape goats? This would be fun, if it were not likely we may observe a Heinrich cycle rather than a Dansgaard-Oescgher cycle.

This graph shows cyclic past Dansgaard-Oesgher or Bond cycles. Note there are cycles in the paleoclimatic record of warming followed by cooling of high latitude Northern regions (Gerald Bond has able to track 23 of these cycles through the Holocene interglacial and into the last glacial cycle). In the 20th century there was also warming of high latitude Northern regions. The past warming and cooling cycles all correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes. There is no correlation with atmospheric CO2 changes. There is no correlation to changes in the North Atlantic drift current and these cycles. Correlation and/or the lack of correlation is a fundamental issue that must be explained by the hypothesis.

What the AR4 explanation of the past warming and cooling cycles? What caused the warming followed by cooling? Magic wand? Why is there again and again correlation of the warming and cooling cycles with large changes in cosmogenic isotopes? (Changes in cosmogenic isotopes are caused by changes in the solar heliosphere or changes in the geomagnetic field.)

One does not need to be prescient to predict what will happen next. The past is a guide to the future. When the same solar magnetic cycle changes occur the planet will react in a similar manner. (Note the magnitude of the temperature decline will be greater due to the declining geomagnetic field and the rapidity of the solar magnetic cycle interruption.) The magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots is declining linearly. The solar magnetic cycle has been interrupted. There will be significant cooling at higher latitudes particular Northern Latitudes particularly in the winter. The first significant cooling is now observable. The masking mechanism that was delaying the cooling is finished. There will be a news worthy significant colder winter 2012/2013.

The gig is up for the extreme AGW paradigm. There will be no scientific explanation for the significant cooling. The cooling will continue.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. Corresponding changes in sunspot brightness and the strength of molecular absorption lines were also seen. This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.

The long temperature series at Svalbard (Longyearbyen) show large variations and a positive trend since its start in 1912. During this period solar activity has increased, as indicated by shorter solar cycles. The temperature at Svalbard is negatively correlated with the length of the solar cycle. The strongest negative correlation is found with lags 10–12 years. The relations between the length of a solar cycle and the mean temperature in the following cycle are used to model Svalbard annual mean temperature and seasonal temperature variations.

These models can be applied as forecasting models. We predict an annual mean temperature decrease for Svalbard of 3.5 to 2oC from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24 (2009–‐20) and a decrease in the winter temperature of ≈6 oC.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2000PA000571.shtml
On the 1470-year pacing of Dansgaard-Oeschger warm events
The oxygen isotope record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core was reanalyzed in the frequency and time domains. The prominent 1470-year spectral peak, which has been associated with the occurrence of Dansgaard-Oeschger interstadial events, is solely caused by Dansgaard-Oeschger events 5, 6, and 7. This result emphasizes the nonstationary character of the oxygen isotope time series. Nevertheless, a fundamental pacing period of ∼1470 years seems to control the timing of the onset of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. A trapezoidal time series model is introduced which provides a template for the pacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Statistical analysis indicates only a ≤3% probability that the number of matches between observed and template-derived onsets of Dansgaard-Oeschger events between 13 and 46 kyr B.P. resulted by chance. During this interval the spacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger onsets varied by ±20% around the fundamental 1470-year period and multiples thereof. The pacing seems unaffected by variations in the strength of North Atlantic Deep Water formation, suggesting that the thermohaline circulation was not the primary controlling factor of the pacing period.

William Connolley and his associates from NCDC or elsewhere should not be banned from WUWT . He deserves respect for defending his position. In spite of his bluster, he is tacitly admitting that the “Debate is not over”. Can you imagine Trenberth, Mann, Hughes, Briffa, Wahl or Ammann debating climate issues on this blog?

Banning dissenting voices would convert this fine blog into another echo chamber comparable to Joe Romm’s “Climate Progress” or John Cook’s “SKS”.

Maybe we should wonder why our tax dollars are supporting William Connolley and Gavin Schmidt to work on climate science. Is that what they are doing or are they political activists?

[Reply: William Connolley is not banned. So long as he abides by the site Policy he may comment. The following posts show why his comments are useful: there is factual pushback by commenters with equal or greater knowledge than William Connolley’s. They provide readers with information and facts that readers can use to make up their own minds. When that happens, invariably it deconstructs the alarmist position in the public’s view. Free and open discussion is infinitely preferable to blog censorship, as practiced by Mr Connolley’s type. ~dbs, mod.]

Let’s look at that graph. CO2 began to rise around 1800 AD, rose at a steady(ish) rate until 1900 and then rose at two rates during the 20th century with the major ‘anthropogenic signal’ being from around 1960/70. A similar picture is shown by the isotope record (Google Engelbeen isotope ratios).

To suggest that in 1800 the first stirrings of industry were immediately reflected in the atmospheric CO2 record stretches credulity to breaking point. To believe that is to believe in an extraordinary global climate system that was in such exquisite balance that a few tons of coal being shovelled through the furnaces of Ironbridge could not be absorbed and used by the biosphere. Something is obviously going on in those graphs, but there is no obvious link from the CO2 record and warming, although vice versa might give a better correlation. Nor can the changes be linked unambiguously to human activity. I can think of four different scenarios which give the above isotope signal, four and a half if you allow minor riffs on the fourth, and two explanations for the CO2 signal.

Here’s one: compare agricultural production against those graphs or search out proxies for agriculture in the dust deposits of North American lakes. Then ponder the biology of diatoms and calcareous phytoplankton, study what happens to planktonic CO2 fixation and carbon isotope differentiation if the dissolved silica levels in the ocean are raised, look at the result of high silica volcanic eruptions and ask yourself if the statement ‘it must be CO2 because we can’t think of anything else’ is really as good as it gets.

No doubt there are other plausible theories, but the current idea that it’s just CO2 will not wash. Why? Because it does not match the facts. And we’re not allowed to make up our own facts, are we?

That this draft for AR5 says that CO2 increase and solar variation each have
****** W/m^ forcings having a 40:1 ratio to each other, with CO2 being the
larger one.

Pre-feedback figure for CO2 is easy enough to get a fair number for. The usual
figure is 3.7 W/m^2 per doubling of CO2 by log function, but I have seen 3.75 and
3.8. It is widely considered that Little Ice Age level of CO2 was 270-280 PPMV,
and 2011 had this figure around 392 PPMV. Using this and 270 PPMV for pre-
industrial CO2 and 3.8 W/m^2 per doubling, the CO2 forcing is 2.04-2.05 W/m^2.

1/40 of that is .051-.05125 W/m^2, which is .022% of the solar radiation
absorbed by Earth according to the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget.

The “solar constant” is about 1366 W/m^2 (for sun at zenith above the
atmosphere. .022% of that is .3 W/m^2.

And the Wikipedia article on “solar variation”, with a graph only for
apparently 1975 ro about 2007, shows variation of almost 1 W/m^2 out of 1366
within the 11-year sunspot cycle. The sun must have had 11-year-smoothed
variation from the early 1900’s to the 1980’s-1990’s *at least* almost half that,
good chance more.

Is IPCC understimating variability in TSI, or is the TSI forcing a net change in
TSI since beginning of some period under consideration? If this is net change,
that can easily explain why the 40:1 ratio mentioned for AR5 is so much
greater than the 14:1 mentioned in AR4. If this is the explanation, then in
AR6, AR7 and AR8, this ratio would grow explosively and fair chance change
sign to negative as TSI decreases to likely less than it was at the beginning
of the time period under consideration.

============

Here’s something: The lapse rate feedback (a negative one) is greater
for greenhouse gas forcings than for others such as change in TSI,
Milankovitch cycles, etc. This is because a change in GHG effect from a
change in GHGs (greenhouse gases) causes a same-direction change in the
global tropospheric lapse rate. This appears to me likely why, even with
6000 PPMV CO2 or 2000 PPMV CO2 plus a major belch of methane,
reconstructed global average surface tremperature never got past 23 C.

In response to several individuals who pointed out that he was banned from Wikipedia for long term violations, William M. Connolley simply replied “No”, and stated that they were ignorant of how the Wikipedia process works. He provided this link:

With regards to William M. Connolley, the link shows he:
• was previously “sanctioned on two separate occasions and desysopped” for misusing his administrative tools
• was “uncivil and antagonistic” (15 separate examples),
• showed “an unreasonable degree of ‘Ownership’ over climate-related articles and an unwillingness to work in a consensus environment” (29 separate examples),
• “has focused a substantial portion of his editing in the Climate change topic area on biographical articles about living persons who hold views opposed to his own with respect to the reality and significance of anthropogenic global warming, in a fashion suggesting that he does not always approach such articles with an appropriately neutral and disinterested point of view” and
• “repeatedly violated the biography of living persons policy…with a clear objective of discrediting the subject” (19 separate examples).

Sanctions (Remedies) proposed by the Arbitrators against William M. Connolley included:
• banning him from Wikipedia altogether for six months,
• banning him from climate change articles, broadly construed, for one year,
• banning him from editing any article that is substantially the biography of living person, where the person’s notability or the subject of the edit relates to the topic area of global warming or climate change,
• subjecting him to an editing restriction for one year, and
• asking him to disengage (in climate change discussions) “to assist with de-personalizing disputes in this area…and to refrain from any further involvement with this topic on Wikipedia.”

The sanction (remedy) imposed by the Arbitrators was:
• “William M. Connolley is topic-banned from Climate change, per Remedy 3” (7 in favor, 0 opposed). Remedy 3 states: “Editors topic-banned by the Committee under this remedy are prohibited (1) from editing articles about Climate Change broadly construed and their talk pages; (2) from editing biographies of living people associated with Climate Change broadly construed and their talk pages; and (3) from participating in any Wikipedia process relating to those articles.”

One arbitrator who voted in favor of this remedy stated “I dislike intensely the idea of separating a knowledgeable editor from editing in the field of his expertise. My instincts impel me to say that I would, if possible, prefer a more carefully tailored, nuanced sanction or set of sanctions that could preserve the value of William M. Connolley’s editing while addressing the problems that exist with it. We have also acknowledged that some of the specific assertions made about him previously were inaccurate or taken out of context. However, the “enough is enough” consensus of the committee is clear, and given the entire record here I can hardly say that the overall structure and outcome of the final decision is an outlandish one. Given the result, I hope that William M. Connolley can refocus his dedication to the project in other ways, while addressing the concerns that have been expressed so that he can return to this topic area in due course.”

William M. Connolley’s blog is Stoat.com. A stoat is a weasel. William M. Connolley’s motto is “Taking Science by the Throat”. He certainly lives up to both his moniker and his motto.

Alec, thanks for your fresh insights into the shortcomings of the IPCC process. I found your masterly rebuttal of Connolly’s misdirections to be a worthwhile precis (and illustration) of your article’s main arguments.

Perhaps the Stoat does serve some function here. One must marvel, however, at his penchant for one- or two-line, and often snide, ‘rebuttals’ backed up by handy links. I never thought I’d see him posting at WUWT – it must be a sign of the end times for CAGW.

Thank you for exposing the unethical, devious behavior of William Connolley. Now that he has been forcibly and unanimously removed from his Wikipedia position for flagrant wrongdoing, he ends up here trying to spread his unscientific propaganda. Connolley is in Gleick’s class. Anything that comes out of his keyboard must be presumed to be a lie, unless corroborrated with verifiable facts. So far, Connolley has come up short.

Hmm, William H. Connolley and Peter Gleick. William and Peter. Will and Pete. Willie-Pete. WP.

WP, or white phosphorus is often used by the military as a smoke-producing agent, to create smoke screens to obscure movement or the sources of an attack, and confound or misdirect the enemy’s resources.

John Eggert says:
February 22, 2012 at 11:19 am
“DirkH says:
Material for his own blog to quote. He didn’t try once to refute what I said. He actually never answers me. I guess I’m talking over his head.

I know. He’ll never answer me. He picks what he can confuse from the thread, throws a lot of papers and facts around to make the thread wander off topic. He works like a text processor; maybe he even has a script for what he does. No logical debate with him. Notice how he never addresses persons – he cuts out a few words from a comment and answers that.

He answers what he wants to answer. He’s an experienced manipulator, but not capable of a real debate.

William Connelly stated
in reply to …> “we can’t think of anything else, so it must be CO2 doing it. ”

“Again, this is just ignorance. Contrary to what the post author has asserted, IPCC does indeed exhaustively consider other possible forcings. If you actually looked at the report, you’d know that.”
———————————————————————————————————————–
Really? They exhaustively consider other possible forcings? Define what supports your use of “exhaustively”. Rawls must have completely missed the findings of this exhaustive consideration. So exhausted as to barely scribble a mention in the first order draft.

I feel so much better now knowing how deep consideration is provided to competing theory. All my concern would have been averted had i known this is how the IPCC works. To make this clear for everyone in the next summary, perhaps they can include a preamble such as……. We the IPCC, are trying really really hard to disprove AGW is real and significant. If we are lucky and work even harder we hope to at least show that it is not catastrophic. But at this point, despite all of our exhaustive efforts, and after deep, deep consideration of every known competing theory or critical study, we find that they all simply disintegrate under scrutiny. We wish we could say that some of these contrarian studies are interesting and worthy of additional research money, or that there may be an outside chance that CO2’s forcing effects have been slightly overestimated in past reports, but we do not see even the slightest chance that we have been wrong. Despite the fact that now 98% of scientists agree with this position, with continued UN support, we will endeavor to carry on, in the hopes of finding even a scintilla of evidence that our conclusions may be less right than we now know.

DirkH says: “[William H. Connolley will] never answer me. He picks what he can confuse from the thread, throws a lot of papers and facts around to make the thread wander off topic. . . . No logical debate with him. Notice how he never addresses persons – he cuts out a few words from a comment and answers that.an experienced manipulator, but not capable of a real debate.”

Well, sure. I have the same experience often when I find it necessary to deny my very bright but still young teenage son some time on his video games. Or to reinforce his interests in doing his chores or homework. Or any other matter of adult-like responsibility.

Simply being smart is way, way over-rated. Smarts absent honesty, integrity, and honor is a very shallow measure of character, indeed, and certainly nothing that warrants the responsibility of leadership. Indeed, smarts absent those deeper qualities is in no way superior to physical strength absent those same qualities–they are just two different ways of being a punk.

But, of course, the punks never see how shallow they themselves are, because they are simply incapable of seeing the broader context. In the same way the AGW extremists can’t understand why they are not being adequately rewarded by society for their loyalty to the AGW punk-hood.

William Connolley – instead of the approach you’ve chosen, how about rebutting the article?

I can get past my personal repugnance for the manner in which you’ve chosen to engage nearly every one here, I challenge you to do the same.

Dazzle us sir, just don’t engage this community as you have been. As someone who was a member of RC, a site well known for it’s extraordinary moderation in editing out anything that smacked of “denialism”, I find it very odd that you are doing here, what none of us could do there.

Reminds me of a comment I read on another site. The person said ‘If CO2 was so cataclysmic why do the same persons rail against nuclear power, the only alternative to what they call pollution. So they never had credibility because AGW was so dire that we had to stop it, but we couldn’t have nuclear’. Something to that affect; and I had never thought about the duality of it all previously.

A global wasteland…let’s stop so-called ghgs…we all gonna die…but don’t use nuclear, the only viable alternative…it’s bad…we should just die instead. <—elevator speech

Tour de force. I have been arguing this line for some time, but never found the words to say it nearly so well as this.
I think, though, you overstate the case as to what will happen to the IPCC and their reputations after the cooling becomes obvious. I predict they will 1) never admit to having been wrong; 2) come up with yet another ad hoc hypothesis such that the cooling is being caused by CO2; 3) claim that the coming catastrophe is now even more severe and unavoidable; and 4) only massive interventions by government controls of emissions will save us.

No, Peter Gleick is not banned and never has been. He is just confused. His posts (and posts from other people) wait in the moderation queue for a moderator to decide whether they are spam or off topic.
I’m a moderator elsewhere so I know what that involves. Depending on the time of day, there can be a delay.
WUWT, unlike all warmist blogs, allows reasonable comment from everybody.

…
I have noticed this with regards to Connelly. He has an agenda but he is called out in real time on WUWT. It gives a greater understanding of his agenda to couple with his past actions.

Apparently he isn’t used to being taken to task. His typical modus operandi is akin to sneak attacks where he has total control, but that’s not the case here. I’m sure he’ll show up again because “The Cause” is taking body blows that will destroy it unless their champions can turn the tide.

I believe that’s what drove Gleick into reacting the way he did–they’re now so overwhelmed by nature’s own little tricks they’re beside themselves: How could it possibly have all gone so wrong?

Late Beck’s interpretation of the data was wrong: most of the wet chemical data were from samples taken over land, in towns, fields and forests. These are worthless for any knowledge of what the real CO2 levels were in that period. Then, like now, the best available data were obtained over the oceans, on ships and coastal with wind from the seaside. These data are all around the ice core data.

Do you know anything about carbon dioxide?

That’s probably one of the most insulting remarks I have read on these pages.

WilliamMC says
You appear to be assuming that equal amounts of WV and CO2 count for the same. Where did you get that assumption from? Its definitely wrong.

Henry@WilliamMC

Have you ever looked a the spectra of water vapor and CO2?
Water vapor absorbs also in the 14-15 region where CO2 absorbs.
Clearly, you rely heavily on the nonsense comung from sites such as Real Climates

where the refs you give me have been removed (1st ref) and/ or admit that the info has not been updated (2nd ref).
Note that if you add all the clouds, which is a massive amount of actual water, the contribution of CO2 to the GH effect becomes neglible. Surely, anyone who is a reasonably educated in chemistry, can see that the Wikipedia data are deliberately inflated / represented to give prominence to a certain idea?

Henry@William
The sun emits 0-5 um and earth emits from 5 -15, predominantly.
The paper refers to near IR but obviously the other absorptions of CO2 (in the UV and IR) also apply. The one at between 4-5 we use to measure the CO2 quantitatively and the UV absorptions can be used to identify CO2 on other planets. Why do you ask me to quantify all this cooling caused by the CO2 when I asked you first for those results?

Anyway, just FYI, I could not quantify it that way, because I donot have the equipment and I think nobody really can – there is no method. But I did look at the problem from the other side. Namely, if the increase in GHG’s caused any warming, the trend should be that minimum temps. should be pushing up average temps. That is not happening. As explained earlier in this thread.
If you missed that, I will repeat it for you here, you can look here for the actual measured data:http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming

So far, after evaluating the daily results of 22 weather stations, the score on my pool table for global warming is as follows:

MAXIMA: rising at a speed of 0.0382 degrees C per annum

MEANS : increasing at a speed of 0.0137 degrees C per annum

MINIMA: creeping up at 0.0056 degrees C per annum

HUMIDITY: decreasing at a rate of -0.02% RH per annum
The latest tables show that, over the past 4 decades, the rates of increase of temperatures on earth i.e. maxima, means (=average temperatures) and minima have risen at a ratio of about 7:3:1. Remember: these are the summaries of actual measured results from a number of weather stations all around the world….No junk science. No hypothesis. Every black figure on the tables is coming from a separate file of figures. Obviously I am able to provide these files of every black figure on the table.

As all the balls now lie on my table, surely, anyone must be able to understand that it was the rise of maximum temperatures (that occur during the day) that caused the average temperature and minima on earth to rise? This implies clearly that the observed warming over past 4 decades was largely due to natural causes. Either the sun shone a bit brighter or there were less clouds. There are different theories on that. Looking at the differences between the results from the northern hemisphere(NH) and the southern hemisphere (SH), what we see is happening from my dataset is that more (solar) heat went into the SH oceans and is taken away by water currents and/or weather systems to the NH. That is why the NH is warming and that is why the SH does not warm.

Another interesting aspect is that a correlation can be picked up if you compare the results in my tables with that of the leaf area index shown in the world chart here:

In the red areas, where we find earth is blooming, and more greening, you will note from the results in the tables that some of the extra heat coming in (the increase in maxima) is picked up and trapped by the increasing vegetation (e.g. Grootfontein, Namibia). In the blue areas, where substantial de-forestation has been going on, you will find mean temperatures and minima declining or staying unchanged, even though maxima are rising. (e.g. Tandil, Argentine). So, it seems if you want the earth to be greener, the natural consequence is that it will also get a bit warmer.

William, I hope you will actually take some time to study this.

Our next step should be to try and get a figure for the correlation of warming and greening. Then we will get an idea of what earth is doing with the extra energy it got during the past 4 decades.

Alec Rawls says:
February 22, 2012 at 11:31 am
====================================
Thanks Alec. Please note that I made the exact same points to Mr Connely here David says: February 22, 2012 at 7:28….and here, David says: February 22, 2012 at 8:18 am (read the last paragraph where I suggested that he, like Peter Gleick reviewing a book he had not read, was commenting on your post , apparently without reading it. Please note that he never responded to what was presented, ignoring my post altogether, and further ignoring the real issues brought up by other posters, as it appears he has so far refused to directly engae you in a conversation.

One further comment on why I think it is important to give serious arguments to Connely, and also point out his evasiveness and reiterate what he refuses to discuss.

From reading his posts here I consider his serious arguments to lack cogency. By this I mean he is only trying to confuse, and not to directly engage the post, Furthermore I do not trust him any more then Peter Gleick. It would not surprise me to see him do an article in the pro CAGW world, where he cherry picks (they do this well) his comments here and the responses, the purpose being to make sceptics appear ignorant or unwilling to debate.

HenryP says:
February 22, 2012 at 10:51 pm
===========================
Henry, that is indeed the kind of dialogue with Connely that I think is needed and suggested here.
David says: February 22, 2012 at 11:48 pm

When I read your intial request for Connely to give actual meaurements to CO2 impact on downdwelling TSI, I found it typically and totally evasive of him to throw it back in your court as it was a very serious question, fundemental to evaluating the role of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Concerning your pool table can you tell me why there are only 22 stations, and if you think that is adequet to indicate the rest of the earth with your numbers? Do all 222 stations thus far show a similar trend?

[Reply: William Connolley is not banned. So long as he abides by the site Policy he may comment. The following posts show why his comments are useful: there is factual pushback by commenters with equal or greater knowledge than William Connolley’s. They provide readers with information and facts that readers can use to make up their own minds. When that happens, invariably it deconstructs the alarmist position in the public’s view. Free and open discussion is infinitely preferable to blog censorship, as practiced by Mr Connolley’s type. ~dbs, mod.]

I’ve always thought WUWT needs more devils advocates and even just devils, it is just hard to keep it on track I guess. What I would say is write your comment go have a break for ten minutes come back take out the inflammatory stucff then hit post and it’ll be a great thread.

Well Smokey, if absolutely nobody besides you ever reads any of my posts, I would still consider it worth posting. I assume you caught the few typos that slipped through.

There was a (n)either that got beheaded, but clearly made no sense that way, and a 590 meV got nano’d by accident.

I liked Dr. Svalgaard’s traditionally terse response to Myrrh’s inanity. I eventually just got rid of MY pet rock, because talking to it was such a waste of time.

Oddly if the earth’s oceans were as “transparent”, as the best long distance optical fibers, then the bottom of the ocean, even at the Challenger Deep’s extreme, WOULD in fact be brightly lit by sunlight. Well there’s a catch there too. Those optical fibers exhibit their ultra low absorption loss only at around 1.5 micron’s (somewhere around there). Absolutely nothing that is solid or liquid, can transmit sunlight (visible) to the bottom of the Challenger deep at any detectable level.

Smokey says:
February 22, 2012 at 6:42 am
…
There appears to be no difference between the broken moral compass of Gleick and Connolley. They both employ dishonesty to advance their totalitarian agenda.

David says
Concerning your pool table can you tell me why there are only 22 stations, and if you think that is adequet to indicate the rest of the earth with your numbers? Do all 22 stations thus far show a similar trend?

Henry@David
To bring all the daily data in average monthly data and then for each month of the year establish a trend going back to 1974 is quite a lot of work. You must imagine the one graph shown here:http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/de-forestation-causes-cooling
for June in Tandil, Argentine,
x12 (each mnth of the year)
x22 (each weather station)
= 264 graphs to trend.

I wish I had a stats class at university to do some work for me to increase the no. of weather stations.

However, I think the sample is already big enough. Spencer is getting the very same 0.13 degreesC/decade over the past 33 years with the satellite data. I am confident that therefore the rest of my data (minima and maxima) is therefore also more or less correct.

As to your last question: no
There is no warming in the Southern Hemisphere. (on average=0.000 degrees C/annum)
Most of the warming happens in the NH. (on average= 0.029 degrees C annum)
(The total global average via the total monthly averages, works out to 0.0137 degrees C/annum

Do make a note that maxima did rise in the SH by 0.047 degrees C/annum and by 0.027 degrees C per annum in the NH. So the extra heat in the SH disppears into the NH, by weather and/or currents…

The fact that Connelly has been reduced to bringing his fallacious arguments here is as good an indication as anything that he and his ilk are desperate scrambling now. People no longer look to the places where he used to have sway as they have become aware of the lies, and are increasingly looking to places such as this for the truth — a place where he has no influence and can only flail about pitifully — alone and isolated.

Oh, how the once mighty have fallen…

I suspect that as a propagandist, he is attracted to this sites’ hit rate and popularity – he must have an audience, it’s a key psychological driver – hence he is here, rather than at DeSmog or RealClimate.

I wouldn’t boot him off, He provides a useful example of a number of rhetorical techniques, such as deflection that are useful to learn, so as to defeat them. His presence here will make us stronger through combat with him, but don’t think that you will ever change his publically expressed opinion. It will remain as it is, while it continues to be useful to him.

Henry@George E.Smith
I do agree with Smokey on that post of yours. It was very good. You are probably one a very few people who actually understands the all the complications in the science behind the GH effect.

Given the charter of the IPCC is to investigate human induced causes of climate change, it is hardly surprising mainstream scientists involved in AR5 will be looking for human effects rather than natural causes.

Jessie: …evidence-based policy does not equate with fact-based.
Those of us in education have to suffer with an even lower standard: research-based. Teaching so simple a subject as elementary reading to a typical classroom population has so many uncontrolled variables that this much ballyhooed requirement should be a source of amusement. Yet people take it seriously. Science is fun, but teaching remains an art.

Correct. And thank you. Teaching science and the science in or of a classroom or environment requiring such remains great fun and gain for all. And very serious work. I am not aware of anything more noble.
cheers Jessie.

> Both Rawls and Connolley make testable statements. The value of Rawls post should stand on its own based on testable science value despite the arrogance of Connolley. In the last 30 years the lower tropospheric global temperature has not changed based on satellite data.

HenryP> Surely, anyone who is a reasonably educated in chemistry, can see that the Wikipedia data are deliberately inflated / represented to give prominence to a certain idea?

The idea that you can work out the relative contributions of CO2 and H2O with just a reasonable education is nonsense. This is part of the “dumb america fallacy. It is very seductive – the idea that you lot have something to contribute, you can be part of the great stream of science, your comments have some value! Alas, the reality is that understanding this stuff takes hard work, far more than you’re prepared to put in.

>> You appear to be relying on http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/644/1/551/pdf/64090.web.pdf, but that is about near-infrared.. Come back when you have even an approximate quantification of the effect.
Henry@William> …Why do you ask me to quantify all this cooling caused by the CO2 when I asked you first for those results? Anyway, just FYI, I could not quantify it that way

Hey, well done. You’ve just managed what 99% of people here can’t do: read someone’s argument, respond to it, and (where appropriate) actually admit that you can’t do something.

Why do I ask you to quantify it? Because it matters. CO2 probably does have smoe bands in the solar spectrum, and those will cause some increase in albedo. But is that effect significant? Is it 10% of the GHE? 1%? 0.0001%? Without some idea of that, there is little point mentioning it. I think if it was as large as 1% I’d likely know about it and IPCC would have mentioned it, but I’m only guessing.

> if the increase in GHG’s caused any warming, the trend should be that minimum temps. should be pushing up average temps.

Leif Svalgaard says:
February 22, 2012 at 2:56 pm
Myrrh says:
February 22, 2012 at 1:05 pm
visible is transmitted through water without being absorbed, not even by electrons, that’s what transmitted means, water is a transparent medium for visible light.

If so, the bottom of the deep oceans should be bathed in bright visible light…
Since it isn’t, codswallop comes to mind…

Well it’s not, but since water is transparent to visible light which means water does not absorb visible light which means it is being transmitted through without being absorbed which means that visible light is not even being scattered by water’s electrons as visible light is scattered by the electrons of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere and visible light is not being absorbed on vibrational resonance level which is what it takes to heat water up (which is how thermal infrared from the sun heats the oceans), then you’ll have to find some other reason it fades away the deeper it goes into the ocean…

Sheesh, how can a scientist specialising in the Sun not know the difference between heat and light and the different effects these have on matter?

The AGWScience Fiction energy budget, 97KT and ilk, is just that, science fiction. You’re all arguing about a world that doesn’t exist!

You can’t feel visible light, it isn’t a thermal energy, it is fantasy fisics to claim this heats land and oceans.

Why don’t you go to all the companies producing glass specifically designed to take out the thermal infrared from the Sun and to let as much visible non thermal in, and tell them, they are exaggerating the problem because visible light will heat up the rooms they think will be kept cool??

Go on – mr great solar scientist, tell them they’re stupid and all their customers are stupid …

Go to all the companies producing light bulbs, for the billions dollar hydroponics and other food growers among others, tell them they’re stupid for using lights specifically designed to take out the thermal infrared and maximise the red or blue for photosynthesis, tell them these lamps of highly energetic visible light will heat their greenhouses and their plants will wilt!

And then go to all the industries producing thermal infrared for heating..

What is stupid, totally stupid, is the claim about visible light. That this now standard education fare is one thing, but experts in the sun not spotting how stupid this is? Or any ‘claiming they are scientists’ without showing any rationality in understand the different properties and processes of the different wavelengths? Pathetic.

Scientists are supposed to be expert in observation, you’re not only showing zilch observational skills of the natural world around us, the beginning paradigm of science, you don’t even notice how all these industries around us are falsifying your claim!

And Alec Rawls – as for the fraud of missing stuff from this science fiction energy budget – they’ve taken out the whole of the water cycle! They use it all on brainwashing ..

Think deserts, without the water cycle the Earth would be around 67%deg;C, standard industry figures, the main greenhouse gas cools the Earth by 52°C to get it to the 15°C. That’s where the fraud starts.

Given the persistence of ocean temperatures and the length of time it takes for a change in solar forcing to have full effect, I see some hope that the effects of the coming Minimum (Minima) might be moderated or even minimized.

As for the IPCC, it has disqualified itself from any participation in the discussion or in policy-making with its fraud. The “Omitted Variable” tactic has indeed been the core of this. Eliminate that, and little or nothing of its case and conclusions remains.

Smokey says:
February 22, 2012 at 10:27 am
…
The IPCC is a totally political hyena with a thin veneer of [generally wrong] science for camoflage. Edenhofer candidly admits to its agenda. UN kleptocrats intend to steal what they never earned under the guise of “environmental policy”. Edenhofer makes clear that environmental policy is a smokescreen for international theft.
…
Nonsense. There is no indication of any approaching disaster. As a matter of fact, the rise in CO2 is greening the planet. CO2 is a harmless and beneficial trace gas. As the IPCC’s Edenhofer makes clear, the demonization of “carbon” is only a cover story for an immense tax grab to redistribute the wealth of Western taxpayers through the totally corrupt UN [which as always will take its hefty cut], which will then end up in the pockets of despots. And the world’s poor will be just as poor as ever.
…

But why pick on CO2? Because it is an inelastic, and tightly coupled proxy for human energy use, and hence an excellent stealth lever to establish control with

boston12gs says:
February 22, 2012 at 8:13 am
Philip Bradley says:
February 22, 2012 at 7:14 am
“If the trend (correlation) persists over a sufficiently long period with a sufficiently high correlation then it does indeed mean there is a causal relationship between whatever there is a correlation between.”

Ha, ha, so this is what passes for “science” among AGW extremists. :-)

It is science, or more correctly epistemology. Unless of of course you subscribe to non-causal mechanisms at work in the universe.

If A and B change together (are correlated) then this is either due to chance or a causal relationship. What other explanation could there be?

The longer the correlation persists, the less likely it is due to chance and the more likely it is due to a causal relationship.

Of course chance can never be completely eliminated, but this is true of all science.

Late Beck’s interpretation of the data was wrong: most of the wet chemical data were from samples taken over land, in towns, fields and forests. These are worthless for any knowledge of what the real CO2 levels were in that period. Then, like now, the best available data were obtained over the oceans, on ships and coastal with wind from the seaside. These data are all around the ice core data.

Do you know anything about carbon dioxide?

That’s probably one of the most insulting remarks I have read on these pages.

=============

Gosh, I didn’t see it as that strong… But my point stands. Ferdinand shows no knowledge of carbon dioxide and that is clearly the problem he has in judging Beck’s data. I’ll give one question to get the ball rolling – where the heck do you think you’ll find carbon dioxide if not where there’s life?

Exwarmist, and you thought they were joking when they said they would tax the very air you breathed. Oh, and Smokey’s “And the world’s poor will be just as poor as ever.” will have a lot more company to share their misery with. Hell, they already do.

“Well, sure. I have the same experience often when I find it necessary to deny my very bright but still young teenage son some time on his video games. Or to reinforce his interests in doing his chores or homework. Or any other matter of adult-like responsibility.

nomnom says:
February 22, 2012 at 2:00 pmA central claim seems to be that: “The raw evidence (solar climate correlations vs. CO2 climate correlations) says that the sun is the much stronger driver”
I don’t think this strong claim is justified.
The evidence for the claim is woefully inadequate.

You personally may think that, but your thinking meets not the facts.

There is evidence about the heliocentric tide functions of the planets for example the distance weighted tide function of Mercury/Earth as looked from the Sun. This function has a strong correlation with the sea level oscillation on Earth and a weak but phase coherent correlation with the reconstructed measured global UAH temperatures.

There is evidence that there is a connection between solar tides and the global temperatures. reconstructed as hadcrut3 data. There is no correlation between theses oscillations and any variation of CO2.

Adding some 10 heliocentric tide functions there is evidence that the global temperatures reconstructed as hadcrut3 there is a strong correlation with the measured global (hadcrut3) temperature:

There is evidence about the heliocentric tide functions of outer planets for example Neptune, Pluto and Quaoar. This function has a strong correlation with the cycles Bond et al. have reconstructed over 10000 years, and which stamp the known great climate cycles of about 1000 years.

Weighting some tide functions from the density of the planets and other reason. there is evidence that the proxies from Neff et al. correlate with the tide functions from the Sun; simple shifted the solar tide pattern there are some correlations between the Neff et al. data from the Oman cave and the solar tide spectrum

Science is to recognize relations in nature. To ignore facts is not a method of science. Temperature proxies on Earth from archives of stalagmites, tree rings, hematite’s, bentic foram’s or ice, contain effects of processes of a wide range of frequencies. Some 20000 years ago the Earth surface has increased ~8° Cel. in two years and does relax very very slowly.

There is an idea from R. Ehrlich that the diffusion waves of photons from the inner Sun to the surface of the Sun build resonance modes depending on the diffusion time of about 190000 years and the geometry oft the sphere. If we take the well known power peaks of the FFT data from the Antarctic it is easy to simulate the Vostok data in the Antarctic with the Excel tool.

This means that there are many significant correlations between the terrestrial climate and solar functions, and there are many more have found to show.

I never have read about a correlation of the well known global true functions (not linear killing the truth of the oscillations) and the function of rising global CO2. Moreover I have no knowledge of a climate paper that respects the global temperature proxies prior to the 18th century; it seems it is a taboo in the geocentric climate community.

Maybe there growth a heliocentric climate community; the spirit of ‘times are changing’. And the answers are no more blowing in the wind.
Last remark To Whom It May Concern. It is great that free speech is practice here. It is great that as well scientific arguments are written and also climate politics sayings are written. But because these are different discussion levels, a mix leads to confusion. Since climate politics has shifted to war, my impression is that the ‘signal to noise ratio’ of simple science arguments to mind war talking has gone near zero; it’s unfortunate.

William M. Connolley says:
February 23, 2012 at 3:45 am
> where the heck do you think you’ll find carbon dioxide if not where there’s life?

Venus.

==========

Give it enough time .. Like conditions on Earth had bacteria taking what visible energy it could from the Sun for the CHEMICAL change of creating sugars out of that and carbon dioxide, they cleaned up our atmosphere, produced oxygen and here we are – Carbon Life Form fully supported and contributing to the Carbon Cycle.. Our plants have evolved from that beginning and are particularly expert at converting visible light and carbon dioxide for growth, they exhale it to keep the cycle going. They’re self sufficient in this. Plants only bothered creating us for better dispersal of seed..

… and we’re running low on carbon dioxide..

We can’t get enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, we produce our own for effecient transport of oxgygen through the blood – in every lungful of air we breathe in is 6% carbon dioxide which we’ve produced, and every lungful we breathe out, 4%. We’re around 20% Carbon and the rest mainly Water.

Life needs carbon dioxide. By denigrating it, by calling it a toxic, the ‘greens’ show themselves for what they are, anti life itself.

You know that there are dark clouds (containing more water) and that there are white clouds. If you carefully look at the white clouds it almost seems as if they radiate also from the inside to the outside (when the sunlight falls on them).
So, now, by bringing in your kind of physics, how do you explain,exactly, why dark clouds are dark and why white clouds are white?

The increase in CO2 levels does not explain the current hiatus in the warming. The longer this continues, the more obvious it becomes that it is probable that the sensitivity to CO2 has been over-hyped. If temperatures actually begin to fall over the next decade, then tis will be even more of a problem.

AR5 will be released at a time when the prospects of a resumption to increasing temperatures does not look strong and when instead the prospects of a modest fall in temperatures would appear more likely. Against such a back drop the shrill cry about the dominant effect of CO2 frankly looks ridiculoous. The IPCC would be better advised to be more circumspect if they want to be around for the long game. Being too shrill will hasten their demise since the public will not buy into it especially given the risining costs of energy, green taxes and the poor state of the economy.

It is rarely wise to over play one’s hand and the IPCC would be well advised to consider what effect there will be on it, if it over plays its hand.

The planet itself is debunking the alarmist scare tactics. Connolley gets a big FAIL as usual. Nothing he claims has stood up to empirical, testable evidence. He is just a propagandist for the global warming scare.

Sucks to be in a forum where there is pushback with verifiable facts, no? Now that Connolley has lost his Wiki authority, he is being exposed as a limp proponent of the debunked CAGW fantasy. Hurts to be impotent, doesn’t it? The planet is falsifying Connolley’s belief system. So who should we believe? A reprimanded and punished climate alarmist? Or planet Earth?

> Connolley says: “Lets test ‘In the last 30 years the lower tropospheric global temperature has not changed based on satellite data’.” Yes, let’s test that

Notice that you swapped to tropics-only, not global. And that the bottom pic is MT, not LT. But that even so that pic falsifies the original assertion – that the atmosphere isn’t warming. It clearly is, even on your pet pictures.

> Connolley gets a big FAIL as usual

Someone claims the atmosphere isn’t warming. I demonstrate that it is. *You* then demonstrate that its warming. And you then claim I’ve failed? Clearly you live in your own private reality.

“Someone claims the atmosphere isn’t warming. I demonstrate that it is.”

Connolley ‘demonstrates’ nothing. He only gives his un-cited opinion, while I provide verifiable facts. Connolley gets to have his alarmist opinion, but he doesn’t get to have his own facts; this isn’t Wikipedia. Another fact is this: CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. More is better. It is greening the planet. Those verifiable facts falsify everything Connolley stands for. The planet and the null hypothesis are thoroughly debunking the hapless Connolley, who flounders around trying to make excuses for his preposterous scare tactics.

LazyTeenager says:
February 22, 2012 at 4:19 am Alec says
“Such a high degree of correlation over such long time periods implies causality, which can only go one way. Global temperature cannot be driving solar activity, so there must be some mechanism by which solar activity is driving or modulating global temperature change”
————
This is a logic fail. If two separate things are trending together it’s does not follow that one causes the other.

That what you argue on is called ‘Cum hoc ergo propter hoc’ ‘The fallacy is to assert that because two events occur together, they must be causally related. It’s a fallacy because it ignores other factors that may be the cause(s) of the events.’

There is another fallacy called ‘Red herring’ ‚This fallacy is committed when someone introduces irrelevant material to the issue being discussed, so that everyone’s attention is diverted away from the points made, towards a different conclusion.’

There are several things. Logic, causality, science. First, science in general only can recognize relations, but not/never ‘separation’. There is no science criterion on ‘separation’. Causality is the idea that something follows (in time). This idea is common in physics, especially in the physics of processes using forces. But in the science of philosophy this idea is not valid, because it is impossible that causality or time has a beginning and it is also impossible, that causality or time has no beginning.
Logic is an algorithm using strong stated premises, but if the premises are untrue, the conclusion is also untrue.
In science it has been recognized for true that the temperatures on Earth is an effect of the heat power of the Sun. This is evident from the knowledge of a decreased earth surface temperature if the Moon blocks the heat power from the Sun while an eclipse.
Temperature changes on Earth are known from samples in the Antarctica and are limited to about 8° Cel. in the last million years. But such temperature increase of 8° Cel. for long happened in about two years. And because specific frequencies of periodic cycles are known, it can be said, that there must be an exact geometry in nature that makes such physical oscillating or resonating process possible. This is a must on geometry, and is does not mean, that the mechanism is known, or must known.

A recognizable law in physics of heat is that a heat current driven by a heat source only can flow from warm to cold, but never from cold to warm. Knowing this and the recognitions about the connection of the heat source, the Sun and one of the receivers of the heat the earth, this is not a case for the logic fallacy, you have argued. It seems to me that you have i.) ignored other known factors and ii.) have introduces irrelevant material to the issue being discussed.

However, there is a relation between solar tide functions and the global Earth temperatures.

William, you now refer me to the IPCC itsself, which is where I found all the problems to have started. They looked at the increase in GHG versus the warming observed and then weighted a “forcing” on each GHG, largely based on the increase/decrease of GHG observed since 1750.
This is the worst mistake any scientist can make: look at the problem from the wrong end. You can only do that if you are absolutely sure what the cause is of your problem.
You were asked to provide me with a balance sheet,
showing me exactly how much radiative warming and how much radiative cooling is caused by the CO2 and also how much cooling is caused by the CO2 by taking part in photo synthesis.
(You need warmth and CO2 to make food and plants and trees. That reaction is endothermic, so the CO2 also consumes energy from the atmosphere with the process of photo synthesis)
So, where are the test results? You claim that they exist, in fact you think I am so stupid that I donot “understand” that kind of physics
which is actually in admission that you yourself do not understand it. If you want to understand,
better begin your 1st lesson herehttp://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011

Anyway, nevermind all of that (ignorance?), to quote from the ref. you gave me: “They all show patterns of changes in extremes consistent with a general warming, although the observed changes of the tails of the temperature distributions are often more complicated than a simple shift of the entire distribution would suggest (see Figure 3.38)”.
Now, if you carefully look at figure 3.38 you will note with me that the period that most closely represents the time that I also analysed is the one for 1979 – 2003. It is represented by the red lines and the only (correct) conclusion to draw from the patterns of the red lines is that cold nights are increasing and warm nights are decreasing.
So does that not show exactly that I am right?
It is as I said: my data (and theirs as well, it is just a matter of how they show it), clearly show that it is not minima (that happen during the night) that is pushing up the average temperature of earth (during the past 35 years). It is the maxima, that happen during the day, that is pushing up the average temperature.
You do not see that?http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming

> Temperature changes on Earth are known from samples in the Antarctica and are limited to about 8° Cel. in the last million years. But such temperature increase of 8° Cel. for long happened in about two years

The time resolution of the deep Antarctic cores isn’t even close to resolving individual years. To make claims about things happening in 2 years, you’d need to be looking at the shorter Greenland cores. And even they don’t say 2 years.

Funny. It is actually the climate science community that pointed out the errors, not the [snip] community, which never admits their errors. It is real climate scientists that alerted the report’s authors to their errors (they went ahead and published anyway, to the detriment of their reputation). It is real climate scientists that alerted AAAS new feed and Scientific American of the error. It is real climate scientists that pointed out to the public the mistake. Not you [snip]

[Reply: Strike one… strike two… ~dbs, mod.]

[I think this says the post has both strikes one and two for the two snips.]

[The HuffPo story is still there, it’s the one titled “A Brief Lesson in the Integrity of Science: Climate Scientists Challenge Bad Science, No Matter the Source.” Sigh.]

[Later on:]

Smokey says:
January 19, 2011 at 7:45 pm

In a comment following his last scientifically illiterate rant, a WUWT moderator challenged Peter Gleick to write an article for WUWT. It was predicted that Gleick lacked the “stones” to write an article.

As predicted, Gleick put his tail between his legs and skedaddled. So I would like to personally issue the same challenge: write an article for WUWT. I predict you don’t have the balls, Mr Gleick.☺

You’ve been slapped across the face with a glove. In public. The gauntlet is down.

[I haven’t tried to chase down that reference.]

[Good grief, even Scott Mandia chimes in (Scott is mentioned in the HuffPo story too):]

Scott Mandia says:
January 20, 2011 at 6:31 am

Peter Gleick is correct. The Climate Science Rapid Response Team was contacted by more than one journalist two days before the report was made public. These journalists suspected the +2.4C value by 2020 was innaccurate. Gavin Schmidt was alerted to the issue and he immediately contacted the author, Liliana Hirsas, to explain her error. Unfortunately, Hirsas, was either unable to or chose not to stop the presses.

[His followup corrects an error about who contacted whom.]

Reply: This is Charles the Moderator aka ctm, while still maintaining my administrative rights, I’m not around much the last six months or so and often don’t even read the articles. Apparently the newer team of volunteer, unpaid, moderators did not realize that I had banned Peter Gleick last year for repeated use of the “d” word.

Most moderators don’t have access to the filter lists, that’s an administrator right, so they were working from either memory or someone’s compiled list when they stated Gleick was not banned.

They were in error. Gleick was banned. I did it. I do not regret it. It was not illegal, nor even a blip in blog policy. Can I be trumpeted as a hero for my confession now? (I thought about (attempting) writing [this] in Gleickonian style), (but (i.e.(,))) I’m not familiar, with, it anti-write it off. ~ctm

This is an excellent example of why one should not take the field of so-called climate science seriously:

1/ Data points are plotted without any associated statistical and systematic errors;

2/ The uncertainty in the fit due to the arbitrary start and end points in the times series is not taken into account;

3/ A model is fitted to the data, in this case a simple linear fit. However, the uncertainties in the model ie,. the uncertainties in the slope and intercept due to 1/ and 2/ and also due to the intrinsic natural variability in the data are not reported.

4/ No rationale is given for assuming the the appropriate model to fit to the data is linear.

In experimental physics, the numbers from a model fit to data are meaningless without the associated statistical and systematic errors – there is no way to accept or reject the null hypothesis.

Don’t blame me; WFT is the “skeptics” favourite site. If you want error bars, you can look at the plots from the IPCC instead.

> there is no way to accept or reject the null hypothesis

I don’t agree. But if you *do* agree, then you have no business making statements about the trends. In particular, you’re not able to accept the original assertion – that there has been no warming. And so, like me, you’re obliged to reject it, even if for a different reason.

> So after ~ 350 comments, nobody has been able to refute the basic claim by the author that the IPCC effectively ignores solar, with the exception of TSI.

Providing you carefully avoid everything the IPCC has to say on the subject, yes.

Providing you carefully avoid everything the IPCC has to say on the subject, yes.

That’s a good piece of advice, William. But one doesn’t necessarily have to do it “carefully”–The IPCC is such a politicized rendition of what they hope people will believe about the climate (and control of individual liberties) that their pronouncements (along with your reliance on them) is basically worthless.

They’re as trustworthy as Mr. Gleick; they’re as nefarious as your involvement in Wikipedia–which has been a career-killer for you (at least when attempting to argue in favor of IPCC pronouncements and most everything else climate-related).

And yet you continue.

Your last post made no sense. Your parsing and skipping and subterfuge has reached the point that you’ve painted yourself into a nonsensical corner. I don’t believe you’re after honest inquiry here (It certainly wasn’t your objective at Wikipedia); I fully believe you’re so warped you don’t know what to believe.

But what’s being demonstrated more convincingly now is that the small amount of global warming the earth is seeing (if it exists at all) is beneficial–that man’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 is also beneficial, and even if you could prove the latter caused the former, there’s nothing you or the US Government or even the UN could do about it because the governments of the world are onto their ploy–India, China, and the other coal-burning developing nations are NOT going to stop contributing the lion’s share of this beneficial gas. And more and more people are discovering that your CAGW or DAGW or whatever you want to call this movement is one big falsified effort to curtail energy sources–which necessarily requires government intervention and reduction in personal freedom.

In the meantime, $billions are being wasted trying to push the Green Agenda while more worthy and serious environmental concerns are going neglected. Poor and unprepared people are dying from hunger and the cold.

I say nay let Connolley stay as well as Gleick ect as I said innumerable times here, these guys are a God send to AGW skepticism denial etc. We are no seeing the fruits of allowing these people free reign to shot themselves LOL

all 4 main atmospheric gases, N2, O2, water vapor, and CO2 have IR absorption capabilities

No. N2 and O2 are diatomic.

Henry@William
Sorry, it seems you get hammered here,
I take it you agree now with me that the IPCC and their “scientists” have fooled us all,
including yourself?

Actually the above statement is also not correct, strictly speaking. I agree with you on the N2. But the O2 has a system of inter-reaction or inter-action with itsself, O2+O +UV = O3 and as far as I understand it, this is sort of in equilibrium,
with possible intermediate stages.
In the outgoing spectra of earth, you can see that the O2-O3 susytem also absorbs in
you guessed it,
exactly the same place where CO2 and water (vapor) also absorb:
between 14 and 15 microns.
It is a weak absoprtion, but nevertheless it is there, and because the % is high, it could account for a large portion of the 14-15 missing from earth, attributed to CO2, mostly.

“visible is transmitted through water without being absorbed, not even by electrons, that’s what transmitted means, water is a transparent medium for visible light.”

This is interesting to me, because I have been on and in the water a lot and there are all kinds of blue to see, from blue-green to mediterranean blue to caribbean blue. The blue is really a property of water.

>>> all 4 main atmospheric gases, N2, O2, water vapor, and CO2 have IR absorption capabilities
>> No. N2 and O2 are diatomic.
> Sorry, it seems you get hammered here

Pardon? Your man makes an obviously incorrect statement. I point out the reason he is wrong (that O2 and N2 are diatomic. I could have continued to point out the reason, but having got that clue I think you could probably work it out yourself). And you think I got hammered?

What we see here is the same as elsewhere on this thread: your people make statements that are simply and trivially wrong. And none of you “skeptic” people notice, because (a) you’re not in the least skeptical of anything anyone on your “side” says; and (b) you don’t know the basic physics well enough to pick up the errors anyway.

William M. Connolley says:
February 23, 2012 at 6:03 am “Temperature changes on Earth are known from samples in the Antarctica and are limited to about 8° Cel. in the last million years. But such temperature increase of 8° Cel. for long happened in about two years”
The time resolution of the deep Antarctic cores isn’t even close to resolving individual years. To make claims about things happening in 2 years, you’d need to be looking at the shorter Greenland cores. And even they don’t say 2 years.

Clearly the lack of warming post 2000 is a big problem for the GHG Forcings theory Fail.

You are correct as far a UAH is concerned. Different data sets have different dates for the time they first become negative. The following summarizes this for several different sets.

Following is the longest period of time (above10 years) where each of the data sets is at least slightly negative (or flat for all practical purposes).

RSS: since December 1996 or 15 years, 2 months
HadCrut3: since March 1997 or 14 years, 10 months
GISS: since August 2001 or 10 years, 6 months
UAH: It never quite reaches a negative value but it might with the February or March numbers.
Combination of the above 4: December 2000 or 11 years, 1 month
Sea surface temperatures: February 1997 or 15 years, 0 months

What we see here is the same as elsewhere on this thread: your people make statements that are simply and trivially wrong. And none of you “skeptic” people notice, because (a) you’re not in the least skeptical of anything anyone on your “side” says; and (b) you don’t know the basic physics well enough to pick up the errors anyway.

One of the things you’re seeing here is feedback you don’t get at Wikipedia. Listen up, this is a learning opportunity. WUWT’s audience is not the most technically knowledgeable people on the web, several others expect a more expect a greater knowledge and skills. However, WUWT is the best springboard on the net for people who have heard the continual mantra from the mainstream and are discovering that doom doesn’t seem to be happening.

There was a big uptick in readership after Climategate, and I got the sense that the newcomers were less knowledgeable than us oldtimers. I’ve tried to make my posts more about teaching than I had in the past.

Why didn’t your message get taken to heart? A few items:

> And none of you “skeptic” people notice

Software engineers rarely use absolutes. I resent you stating that I don’t notice statements that are “simply and trivially wrong.”

> (a) you’re not in the least skeptical of anything anyone on your “side” says

Utter nonsense. Prove otherwise. :-) Go back to the (dare I open that can of worms) the discussion about CO2 frost in Antarctica. When your audience consists of thousands you can’t expect them read all the comments or pick out the best.

> (b) you don’t know the basic physics well enough to pick up the errors anyway.

Your definition of basic physics may not jibe with ours. The physics class in my high school did not go into radiative physics of various gasses but was still good enough to get 800 on the Physics SAT achievement test. Many readers here probably didn’t take physics, or if they did thought it was a hard subject. Deal with it. At least they’re here and learning.

And in your case, your reputation preceded you. It will take quite a while for many people here (especially the pre-Climategate crowd) to pay attention to what you offer, even when it’s worth reading.

How many of your favorite teachers regularly insulted the intelligence of your fellow students?

> Connolley says: “Lets test ‘In the last 30 years the lower tropospheric global temperature has not changed based on satellite data’.” Yes, let’s test that
Notice that you swapped to tropics-only, not global. And that the bottom pic is MT, not LT. But that even so that pic falsifies the original assertion – that the atmosphere isn’t warming. It clearly is, even on your pet pictures.
———————————————————————————–
So, Connolley links to a chart demonstrating that the climate modles are %200 to %400 off of there projections. Nice self goal there. Perhaps now you would like to update that chart and tell me where those tropical troposphere T are at. I think you will find them considerably reduced. You do know that the SST are in fact eually missed by the models. In Fact the models are diverging further and further from the observations. It is nice to see how, in your post in response to Alex’s detailed comments on your rambling snipets, you still did NOT engage the central parts of his criticism of the obvious fact that you apparently never really read the post as he did in fact in detail answer your concern about explaining current T based on natural causes, including solar changes, and he did it with peer reviewed references. This was the central part of your criticism, but you ignore his comments. Instead you “cherry picked” one aspect to show that there was some little warming in the tropical troposhere, albeit that that warming was 1/4 of what the models predicted which in any science experiment, indicates a failed hypothesis, and also ignoring that since McKitricks grapic was done tropical tropospher T has plunged.

So please copy the several paragraphs of Alex’s post to your comments, then respond in detail as to why he is wrong. It is called dialogue, which is different then the subterfuge hit and run tatics of your little snippets.

When you decide to visit a site, and your first comments contain condecending remarks, do not later .come back upset about similar comments reflected back towards you. And follow your own counsel…”You need to actually read what they have written and argue against it, not just write your stuff in a vacuum.” with one little snippet. I do mean adress the main points of the post. Your first comment was wrong and condesending toward the author.

You know that there are dark clouds (containing more water) and that there are white clouds. If you carefully look at the white clouds it almost seems as if they radiate also from the inside to the outside (when the sunlight falls on them).
So, now, by bringing in your kind of physics, how do you explain,exactly, why dark clouds are dark and why white clouds are white?
==========
Sorry Henry, I really don’t know what you’re trying to say here. “My” kind of physics is traditional science, well established knowledge about the energy from the Sun.

The problem here is that AGWSF has given the properties of thermal infrared to visible light and shortwaves either side – claiming these are doing what thermal infrared, heat, is known to do. They further confuse by claiming ‘all electromagnetic energy is the same’ and ‘all converts to heat’. Because of this you (generic) no longer understand the basic difference between heat and light energies – you’ve stripped them of all their properties and processes.

The thermal energy of the Sun is heat, that is what we feel from the Sun, that is what warms us up, that is what is capable of heating oceans and land, visible from the Sun can’t physically do this.

Consequently, you (generic) don’t know what heat is anymore. That’s why none of you find it strange that this AGW energy budget says that no heat reaches us from the Sun!

http://thermalenergy.org/
Thermal Energy Explained
What is thermal energy ?
Thermal Energy: A specialized term that refers to the part of the internal energy of a system which is the total present kinetic energy resulting from the random movements of atoms and molecules.
The ultimate source of thermal energy available to mankind is the sun, the huge thermo-nuclear furnace that supplies the earth with the heat and light that are essential to life. The nuclear fusion in the sun increases the sun’s thermal energy. Once the thermal energy leaves the sun (in the form of radiation) it is called heat. Heat is thermal energy in transfer. Thermal energy is part of the overall internal energy of a system.
At a more basic level, thermal energy comes form the movement of atoms and molecules in matter. It is a form of kinetic energy produced from the random movements of those molecules. Thermal energy of a system can be increased or decreased.
When you put your hand over a hot stove you can feel the heat. You are feeling thermal energy in transfer. The atoms and molecules in the metal of the burner are moving very rapidly because the electrical energy from the wall outlet has increased the thermal energy in the burner. We all know what happens when we rub our hands together. Our mechanical energy increases the thermal energy content of the atoms in our hands and skin. We then feel the consequence of this – heat. [Link]Laws of Thermodynamics

Heat TransferThermal energy and heat are often confused. Rightly so because they are physically the same thing. Heat is always the thermal energy of some system. Using the word heat helps physicists to make a distinction relative to the system they are talking about.”

“Near infrared” light is closest in wavelength to visible light and “far infrared” is closer to the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The longer, far infrared wavelengths are about the size of a pin head and the shorter, near infrared ones are the size of cells, or are microscopic.

Far infrared waves are thermal. In other words, we experience this type of infrared radiation every day in the form of heat! The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is infrared.

Shorter, near infrared waves are not hot at all – in fact you cannot even feel them. These shorter wavelengths are the ones used by your TV’s remote control.

Infrared light is even used to heat food sometimes – special lamps that emit thermal infrared waves are often used in fast food restaurants!

The AGWSF energy budget has taken out the direct thermal infrared heat we get from the Sun, and given its properties to visible light.

Well, that was my point: to a large extent, they aren’t. I see the same trivial errors being repeated again and again.

> How many of your favorite teachers regularly insulted the intelligence of your fellow students?

You have the relationship right. But not everyone here has realised it yet.

>> “Lets test ‘In the last 30 years the lower tropospheric global temperature has not changed based on satellite data’.” Yes, let’s test that
> So, Connolley links to a chart demonstrating that the climate modles are %200 to %400 off of there projections.

No, that wasn’t my link; someone else provided that. I did think of adding that I was discussing the observations, and didn’t believe the modelling stuff there – its only McI, after all, you can’t rely on it.

> So please copy the several paragraphs of Alex’s post to your comments…

If you have a specific question, you may ask the sensei. But expecting me to answer some unspecified ramble won’t do. As I take it, the essential point of this post is “vast evidence for solar climate driver rates one oblique sentence in AR5” – that is the title, after all. I don’t have the AR5 – no-one has, only the FOD. But certainly if you look at the AR4, it is trivial to see that the claim in the title is hopelessly wrong.

> and condesending

You mean condescending.

[Reply: Please note that I have corrected a number of your own spelling errors. I correct spelling constantly, but it’s impossible to keep up. ~dbs, mod.]

As usual, Connolley changes the subject, erects his strawman, then argues with his strawman. The central facts in the entire debate, and which I cited, were: “At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and benficial to the biosphere.” Connolley ignored that. “But remember that the word ‘ignore’ is the root word for “ignorance”… CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. More is better. It is greening the planet.”

Connolley avoided trying to refute those facts. In his usual pea-under-the-thimble misdirection, Connolley replied to his strawman, not to the central issue in the whole debate: the claim that CO2 will cause runaway global warming. As we see, the planet strongly disagrees. So Connolley spouts off about minor quibbles while accusing most everyone else of “spouting off”. If it were not for psychological projection, Connolley wouldn’t have much to say.

The facts stated in this comment above form a hypothesis that has never been falsified: anthropogenic CO2 cannot be shown, per the scientific method, in a testable, empirical manner, to have caused any measurable “harm” to the planet. Therefore, CO2 is ipso facto harmless. And the satellite-measured greening of the planet is an established fact. Therefore, the rise in CO2 is beneficial to the biosphere.

Given those facts, the entire “carbon” argument is falsified. Everything else, including Connolley’s endless strawman arguments, is meaningless because the entire scare is based on CO2=CAGW. That conjecture has been decisively falsified. All further taxpayer funding for climate studies should be promptly eliminated as a misappropriation of public funds.

In my first response Connolley I showed how the links he included as documentation of his claims actually document MY claim: that the only solar variable that the IPCC gives any weight to is TSI (total solar insolation). Now he returns, repeating his claim that it is yours truly who is ignorant of what the IPCC reports contain:

>Really? They exhaustively consider other possible forcings?

Yes.

> Define what supports your use of “exhaustively”.

You just have to read the IPCC reports. I’ve already provided links; here is one to the TAR. Or, you can read the FAQ.

> Rawls must have completely missed the findings of this exhaustive consideration.

Yes, either he has never read the AR4 report or he has glazed over the bits he found inconvenient.

Connolley is linking to the FAQs again? Earlier he linked to FAQ9.2 where, as I pointed out, the only solar variable considered here is “solar output,” or TSI. So what does Connolley do this time? Instead of linking to FAQ 9.2 again, he links to a concatenation of every FAQ from every chapter of AR4! That is, he is trying to HIDE what he is referring to, so that he won’t be so easy to rebut this time.

Sorry Mr. Connolley, but we already know which FAQ you mean to refer to. Your attempt to hid your reference is a failure. You are still referring to “solar output.” Your reference still supports MY claims, not yours.

But more importantly, if you are trying to hide your reference, that is NOT AN ACTUAL REFERENCE. Call it an ANTI-reference. Which makes a weird kind of sense. What else should we expect from an anti-scientist, engaging in what my review calls “pure, definitional anti-science”?

Just as anti-matter includes an array of anti-particles (anti-protons, anti-electrons, etcetera), so too our anti-scientists observe the opposite of scientific methods in each detail, because they are not trying to seek truth, they are trying to avoid it.

Connolley’s link to the Third Area Report is not a repeat of one of the earlier references that I already showed to document the opposite of what Connolley claims, but it may be the king of such backward references. My post includes a link to a TAR subsection that contains the core of its omitted variable fraud, but Connolley’s TAR link shows its omitted variable fraud much more concisely. Thanks for this William! It is well worth a read:

The fundamental source of all energy in the Earth’s climate system is radiation from the Sun. Therefore, variation in solar output is a radiative forcing agent. The absolute value of the spectrally integrated total solar irradiance (TSI) incident on the Earth is not known to better than about 4 Wm-2, but satellite observations since the late 1970s show relative variations over the past two solar 11-year activity cycles of about 0.1%, which is equivalent to a variation in radiative forcing of about 0.2 Wm-2. Prior to these satellite observations, reliable direct measurements of solar irradiance are not available. Variations over longer periods may have been larger, but the techniques used to reconstruct historical values of TSI from proxy observations (e.g., sunspots) have not been adequately verified. Solar variation varies more substantially in the ultraviolet region, and studies with climate models suggest that inclusion of spectrally resolved solar irradiance variations and solar-induced stratospheric ozone changes may improve the realism of model simulations of the impact of solar variability on climate. Other mechanisms for the amplification of solar effects on climate have been proposed, but do not have a rigorous theoretical or observational basis.

All but the last two sentences are about TSI and how it shows very little variation, adding that there is a significant amount of slop in the paleo reconstructions of TSI. (As the paleo reconstructions have improved, and as direct measures have improved, it has been confirmed that TSI variation is indeed quite small. That is why the RF ratio between TSI and CO2 has gone up from 13 to 1 in AR4 to 40 to 1 in AR5: TSI variation has been confirmed to be consistently tiny.)

While total solar output remains virtually constant over the solar cycle, there is a pronounced spectral shift that could have effects on atmospheric chemistry, or on the atmosphere’s electrical circuit. The second to last sentence deems the possible atmospheric chemistry effects as worth considering, while the last sentence deems that all other effects (the electrical circuit theory, which goes unmentioned, and GCR-cloud effects, which go unmentioned) are not worth including (or even mentioning).

And here the TAR is perfectly explicit on the grounds for this omission: they are unsatisfied with the available theories of how a solar amplification mechanism might work. They specifically only look at the evidence for particular proposed mechanisms, which they declare to be wanting. Most importantly, they never even mention the vast evidence (numerous studies finding that solar activity “explains” in the statistical sense something like half of past temperature change) that there must be SOME mechanism besides TSI by which solar activity is driving global temperature.

Most of the present evidence for such a mechanism post-dates TAR, but substantial evidence was already available in 2001. The seminal paper by Friis-Christensen and Lassen (“Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate,” came out in 1991. By AR4, the evidence was overwhelming, but AR4 used exactly the same scheme TAR uses in the paragraph above, and so does AR5. In each report the IPCC authors use theory (their dissatisfaction with present theories of how solar activity might be driving climate) as an excuse for completely omitting the evidence that some such mechanism is at work. Theory trumps evidence. Pure, definitional anti-science, and Connolley is one of the “anti-particles” of this anti-scientific world.

So thank you Mr. Connolley for visiting the WUWT cloud chamber, giving us a chance to document your anti-scientific tracks, the weird ways that you spiral in the opposite direction from reason and evidence. Most illuminating.

Henry@William
I hope you realize that that tiny amount of ozone on top of us, is actually turning away 20-25% of all incoming sunlight by re-radiation in the UV. And that 20-25% is sunlight of the highest energy. If there is less ozone in the atmosphere, more sunlight of higher energy will hit the water, and this could in fact be one of the reaons why more heat is going into the SH oceans, as is clearly happening.
So now we already have three possible reasons as to why maxima are rising:

1) more intense sunlight
and/or
2) less clouds
and/or
3)less ozone

I predict you might even find more good reasons as to why earth is warming.
But as long as you know and remember from me:
it aint’ the CO2 that is doing it.

> At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and benficial to the biosphere.” Connolley ignored that

Because you’re trying to assert the conclusion. The argument, of which this is but a small part, is “are rising CO2 levels harmful?” (and continues “and if so, what should we do?”).

You’re convinced that CO2 is entirely beneficial. So much so that you say the same thing repeatedly in the same comment. But repetition is no substitute for facts, and you’re not providing the evidence to back up your conclusion.

“visible is transmitted through water without being absorbed, not even by electrons, that’s what transmitted means, water is a transparent medium for visible light.”

This is interesting to me, because I have been on and in the water a lot and there are all kinds of blue to see, from blue-green to mediterranean blue to caribbean blue. The blue is really a property of water.

========
This wiki page is wrong here: “The blue hue of water is an intrinsic property and is caused by selective absorption and scattering of white light.”

First of all – that water is a transparent medium for visible light is basic optics. See the page Glenn posts a link to above on transparency and translucency – in the section on UV and Visible in electronic transitions you’ll see the four possible outcomes of these shortwaves meeting matter – electronic transitions because basically by their size this is all they’re capable of .. Anyway, the second is a description which is how reflection/scattering comes about, as for example in our atmosphere, visible is absorbed by the electrons of the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen and sent back out again – that’s how we get our blue sky, the energy is actually absorbed. The third is visible light in a transparent medium, our atmospere is not a transparent medium but water is. In a transparent medium the electrons of the water molecules do not absorb visible light, the molecule does not absorb visible light but transmits it through.

That wiki description is not about water, but does apply to our atmosphere.

You need to explore optics, here’s a good description for educational purposes:

When visible light passes through a transparent material such as glass, its velocity changes according to the Index of Refraction of the material. This slowing is caused by the electrical fields in the material. When the beam of light enters the material at an angle, it is bent or refracted as a result of the decrease in velocity. The refraction is similar to the change in direction of soldiers marching into a muddy field.

Questions you may have include:

•Why does light slow down?
•What is the index of refraction?
•How does light bend?
This lesson will answer those questions. There is a mini-quiz near the end of the lesson.

Light slows down
Visible light is electromagnetic radiation or waveform. The speed or velocity of light in a vacuum is about 186,000 miles per second or 300,000 kilometers per second. The velocity of light or other electromagnetic radiation is typically slower when it passes through a transparent material. For example, the speed of light in water is about 140,000 mi/sec or 226,000 km/sec.

Electrical fields slow it down
The reason electromagnetic radiation is slower when the light passes through a transparent material such as water or glass is because of the effect of the electrical fields surrounding the electrons and nuclei of the atoms in the material. The fields almost act like a “friction” on the light wave, thus slowing it down. It is like trying to walk through a muddy field.

Different for each wavelength
The speed of light in a transparent material is slightly different for each wavelength. That characteristic is called dispersion and responsible for the creation of the spectrum in a prism. (See Dispersion of Light for more information.)

Visible light in a transparent medium can’t get in to be absorbed. You could think of it as the molecules in their own dance, visible tries but can’t enter the dance, and it is passed along, transmitted through.

Do you see what AGWSF has done here? They have given the properties of water to the atmosphere re visible light, claiming that ‘the atmosphere is transparent to visible light as the glass of a greenhouse’ and made water a non-transparent medium. This is the technique of the fictional energy budget, giving the properties of one thing to another, taking laws out of context, and you end up with an impossible world. That’s why it’s all reduced to Stefan Bolzmann ‘vacuum’, ’empty space and radiation’, they’ve taken out real gases with volume and weight and interactions and so no need for convection and conduction.. :) The AGWCarbon dioxide magically defies gravity to accumulate in the atmosphere, even though in the real world it is heavier than air, and never joins with water vapour to come down in the rain because classed as ‘ideal’ gas it has no attraction, when in the real world carbon dioxide is fully part of the water cycle and all pure clean rain is carbonic acid.

There must be many more such tweaks to create their fictional fisics – some are more blatant than others.

haha nice! I came to the same conclusions in 2003 after corresponding with Hansen and finding out that he wasnt interested in any sort of objective science and that TSI wasnt a comprehensive assessment of the sun’s effects.

but of course, that was just my “grasping the pearl in the muddy water” assessment that didnt carry the full weight of scientific rigor…

Wrong again, Connolley. It is a testable, falsifiable hypothesis. Your problem is that you can’t falsify it, so instead you write what you presume I’m thinking. Wrong as usual. I’ve presented a straightforward hypothesis. If it cannot be falsified, and if global temperatures continue as they have for the past decade and a half, the hypothesis will be on its way to becoming a theory. Which of course destroys the CO2=CAGW conjecture. So you had best get busy trying to falsify it, instead of shuffling the pea under your different walnut shells.

Henry@Myrrh
You did not answer the question? Why are dark clouds dark and why are white clouds white?
Also, clearly, for example: UV light, even though it has no feel-warmth, is able to burn you?

=========

That’s just too broad a subject, a cloud can be white from above and dark from below, for example – if you’ve got an objection to something I’ve actually said, then spit it out.

UV – you can’t feel UV, you can’t even feel UV when it’s ‘burning’ you! It even tinier than visible light and even more energetic, think high speed drill.. See the transparency and translucency page, it works on the electronic transition level. Some UV is ionising, which means that not only can it get absorbed by electrons it can knock them out of orbit. The reason you burn is because UV acts on the DNA level and the melanin in your body steps in to neutralise it if it is in greater intensity than your skin can cope with, you get ‘burned’ when melanin production can’t cope with the amount of UV – get a tan gradually and you’ll have no problem. We need UV for vitamin D production, that’s a chemical energy use of it just as photosynthesis is a chemical use of visible light, changing to sugars. These are not ‘heat’ energy uses of them. UV isn’t heating your skin – and as for the hype of these being “high peak energy from the Sun” to sell it as if that means ‘powerful to heat up land and oceans”, UV doesn’t even get through the layers of your skin! It doesn’t get further than the first, of three, layers – and you can stop this oh so powerful energy by putting on a shirt.

All this nonsense could be avoided if you’d just give back to these wavelengths the property combinations unique to each, because that’s how they travel to us from the Sun, a radio wave isn’t a gamma ray.. AGWSF sells this as if ‘all electromagnetism is the same’ and ‘all create heat’, well then describe the mechanism in all the different matter we have which takes this ‘undifferentiated electromagnetism’ and creates the different waves with their own unique properties…

Does a plant take in this ‘undifferentiated electromagnetism’ and then creates the different visible wave lengths? How? This is an AGWSF meme, it is meaningless in the real world. We get different forms of energy from the Sun and these have different properties one from the other, such as different sizes, they have different effects on matter, they have different names..

Smokey says “So you had best get busy trying to falsify it [ie Smokey’s assertion that “CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. More is better. It is greening the planet.”], instead of shuffling the pea under your different walnut shells.”

Isn’t that completely backwards science? You are saying that your hypothesis should be accepted until it is falsified. Science usually works the other way around –> a hypothesis is not accepted until it is verified. The burden is on the person proposing the hypothesis to show it is right, not on the rest of the world to show it is wrong.

There are certainly some good things that would happen in a warmer world with more CO2. There are certainly some bad things that would happen in a warmer world with more CO2. It is easy to come up with a (partial) list of each. But it is damn near impossible to weight the relative importance of the items on the list (and even tougher to estimate the importance of the items NOT on the lists).

Such problems are sometimes called “Wicked problems”.

“Wicked problem” is a phrase originally used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

The net impact of global warming seems to be a classic example of such a “wicked problem”.

Yeah, I tried to get the peregrine falcon entry in Wikipedia down to earth, but failed. Its stoop is still claimed to be 240mph, triple a more realistic value. Vance Tucker’s math model and Ken Franklin’s special effects trump all observation. As with the superbird, so with the super gas–the fairy tale survives.

Just last week Ecotretus posted maps that prove the NE Passage was navigable and navigated before the LIA. And we are doomed by a seemingly decelerating 3mm/year sea level rise. If all the ice melted this century it would increase overall population density by about the same amount that can be extrapolated from current demographic trends–real, live world trends–not imaginary doomsday scenarios. And it probably wasn’t until the MWP that the population of Europe overtook that of North Africa, which kept right on drying up. Climatologically speaking, we live in a benign age.

There really aren’t any competent scholars or scientists who take this climate drama seriously.
–AGF

Alec Rawls is not a scientist, he is an economist. The IPCC fraud is much deeper than he thinks because he fails to understand:
1. Correlation, however convincing, does not PROVE causality.
2. The average temperature of the earth cannot be measured, so the “Mean Global Temperature Anomaly Record” is fraudulent and is not a measure of surface temperature or of its “trends”. It was stated openly to be faked by “Harry” in his Climategate report.

[Reply: My online dictionary defines ‘scientist’ as: a person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences. ~dbs, mod.]

Typhoon noted some legitimate concerns about the graphic from woodfortrees. Yes, if this were a peer-reviewed journal, one would get rejected for failing to include the error bars, failing to identify whether a fit other than linear was appropriate and various other problems. However, in the context of the assertion that “lower tropospheric global temperature has not changed based on satellite data” do you seriously think that addition of error bars could possibly support the contention that the true slope could be flat?

The warmists should be challenged when making unsupportable assertions, but so should the skeptics. Contending that the global temperature is statistically flat over the last 30 years is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence, not a flat assertion that flies in the face of evidence.

Tim Folkerts says “The net impact of global warming seems to be a classic example of such a “wicked problem”.

I disagree, The benefits are KNOWN, empirically demonstrated in thousands of experiments, whereas the catastrophic projections of CAGW are postulated, but thus far extremely underwhelming, global average T stationary, frequency of severe weather is all within normal parameters, sea levels rise is not accelerating, and since 2005 is slowing down or flat. Every year we grow ten to fifteen percent more food , on the same land and water, then we would be able to if CO2 was still at 280ppm. The observations support Smokey’s statement.

There is one thing I don’t understand. Would the high explanation for variance on a short scale imply that the system quickly equilibriates to the new solar magnetic environment? Using the pot of water analogy, if I put the burner on medium, leave it for a while, and then come back and turn it down a bit, and then the temperature of the water goes down, doesn’t that imply the pot was in equilibrium with medium heat before I turned it down?

David says
“Lets test ‘In the last 30 years the lower tropospheric global temperature has not changed based on satellite data’.” Yes, let’s test that
> So, Connolley links to a chart demonstrating that the climate modles are %200 to %400 off of there projections.
———————————————————————————-
Connelly response…
No, that wasn’t my link; someone else provided that. I did think of adding that I was discussing the observations, and didn’t believe the modelling stuff there – its only McI, after all, you can’t rely on it.
—————————————————————————-
David says…
Yes Connelly, I see now that it was in response to Smokey’s link to it. The rest of your comment demonstrate how you are neither a scientist, or a rational and reasonable person to have a conversation with; this in particular…“and didn’t believe the modelling stuff there – its only McI, after all, you can’t rely on it.” McKitrick and McIntyre have been model scientist, willing to have rational debate with anyone, you could learn a great deal concerning real communication from visiting “climate audit”. The math contained within the report concerning tropical troposphere is easy to check and is based on the IPCC projections. (YOU KNOW THIS) Your refusal to believe it without pointing out any flaws is poor science, and pitiful debate.
——————————————————————————–
Connelly quotes one little sentence of my previous post
> So please copy the several paragraphs of Alex’s post to your comments…
And responds…
If you have a specific question, you may ask the sensei. But expecting me to answer some unspecified ramble won’t do. As I take it, the essential point of this post is “vast evidence for solar climate driver rates one oblique sentence in AR5″ – that is the title, after all. I don’t have the AR5 – no-one has, only the FOD. But certainly if you look at the AR4, it is trivial to see that the claim in the title is hopelessly wrong.
————————————————————————————-
First of all my request for you to respond to Alec. Rawl’s post was very specific and not rambling. “It is nice to see how, in your post in response to Alex’s detailed comments on your rambling snippets, you still did NOT engage the central parts of his criticism of the obvious fact that you apparently never really read the post as HE DID IN FACT GIVE A DETAILED ANSWER TO YOUR CONCERN ABOUT CURRENT “T” BASED ON NATURAL CAUSES, INCLUDING SOLAR CHANGES, AND HE DID IT WITH PEER REVIEWED REFERENCES. This was the central part of your criticism, but you ignore his comments.”
Mr. Connelly, that response by Alec is here, Alec Rawls says: .
February 22, 2012 at 11:31 am See if you are capable of a cogent response to his post.

Mr. Connelly leaves with this little demonstration that he can both spell a word, and demonstrate its meaning at the same time.
——————————————–

Connelly says
> and condesending
You mean condescending.
—————————————————————-
Cool Connelly, but your discernment of placement of a comma, does not account for your climate science coma.

P.S. modeling has one d, not moddeling which I think is what you meant. (-;

Surely all of us have, at one time or another, had the wondrous adventure of finding ourselves being driven around by a cab driver spouting precisely the kind of spiraling, unfocused, “look, there’s a squirrel” pseudo-intellectualism as Willie so eagerly, nay desperately, shares with us. To be fair, at least the cab driver is, in the final analysis, engaged in an honorable vocation.

Of course much of the enjoyment of the “genius” cab driver experience is that it tends to be a very focused and time-limited event. No one invites the nutty cab driver to move in with them, or to educate their children, or to engage in a lengthy exchange of pseudoscientific communication and “debate” intended to mislead, obfuscate, and waste away perhaps the single most valuable and precious resource of all (time).

In the same way I find it remarkable that so many here continue to engage Willie as if he were genuinely interested in advancing the scientific dialogue. He’s clearly merely acting as a pseudoscientific activist, provocateur, and propagandist (with the resume to back it up), who apparently believes he is “winning” any time he can cause people of scientific integrity to waste their time chasing his “squirrels” rather than engaging in the ethical pursuit of scientific knowledge.

I mean, the time is your own, feel free to expend it how you wish, of course. I suppose it is hypothetically possible that there may be a less useful use of one’s time than attempting to communicate on a serious level with Willie, although I’m darned if I can think of one off the top of my head. Heck I’ve had stomach viruses with more beneficial outcomes . . . at least in those cases I lost some weight. ;-)

If experience is any basis on which to judge, Willie will continue to be a presence here as long as his “look at me, look at me!” hunger is fed. All good sport, I suppose.

Responding to the other Phil —
The statement of “lower tropospheric global temperature has not changed based on satellite data” does not imply that that the last 30 years of data are statistically flat. But it does deserve explanation.
I meant that the TLT channel data for 30 years ago show about the same values as the current values. To the casual observer, there is no significant difference between the two.
I’ll also say the “30 year trend line” looks like a least squares linear fit and should not be over-interpreted.
Adding context helps. Any direct infrared absorpton effect of CO2 on troposphere temps is likely very rapid, certainly within the time frame of physical mixing of global sources. Say four months.
Now, are the TLT anomaly data for the last four months the same as the correstponding months in 1980??
Oct 2011 0.116
Nov 2011 0.123
Dec 2011 0.126
Jan 2012 -0.093
Average less than +0.1
The corresponding values in 1980 and Jan 1981are -0.034, 0.004, -0.152 and 0.022, with an average near zero.
The difference in averages can’t be statistically significant because the variances appear to exceed 0.1
In 1980 the CO2 concentration is about 335 ppm plus or minus 2
In 2012 the value is 391 ppm
Now I’ll state a null hypothesis that there is no difference between the TLT anomaly values between the two data sets shown. BTW, I’m neither a skeptic nor a warmist. I do think that there is political corruption of the science and that time will resolve the issue in favor of the so-called skeptics.
Nullius in verba

Now, are the TLT anomaly data for the last four months the same as the correstponding months in 1980??
Oct 2011 0.116
Nov 2011 0.123
Dec 2011 0.126
Jan 2012 -0.093
Average less than +0.1
The corresponding values in 1980 and Jan 1981are -0.034, 0.004, -0.152 and 0.022, with an average near zero.
The difference in averages can’t be statistically significant because the variances appear to exceed 0.1

I did a two-sample t-test and you are right — these two sets of data are not significantly different (p = 0.165.

However, the set of data from 1979-80 is relatively high; the data from 2011-12 is relatively low. If you had done the analysis a few months earlier, then the results would have been highly significant. This shows the danger of choosing a brief period from highly variable date and looking for trends. The overall trend is clearly upward and significant (slope = 0.01361 C/yr, R-Sq = 34.8%, p = 0.000).

If science is on the side of the extreme AGW paradigm, surely there is a scientific response to these questions.

How does AR-4 explain the 23 cycles of warming followed by cooling that have been found in the paleoclimatic record? Why are there cosmogenic isotope changes at each of the past warming and cooling phases?

The following is link to my comments that has links to papers and more details. Note I include papers that explain the mechanism and show planetary cloud cover correlates with both GCR intensity and changes to the global electric circuit caused by the solar wind bursts that remove cloud forming ions, by the process that is called electroscavenging. Note I am quoting published papers.

Why is there no mention of electroscavenging over at Realclimate? Selective filtering of science?

Those promoting the extreme AGW paradigm and AR4 appear to selectively ignore and filter research and data, that does not support their paradigm. The planet has repeated warmed and cooled with greater warming at northern higher latitudes. i.e. Exactly what we are currently observing.

See this link. Big picture, figure 3, which shows Greenland ice sheet temperatures over the last 12,000 years. Note the cyclic increases and decreases of high latitude temperatures which correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes. Note AR-4 specifically notes this cyclic warming and cooling cannot be explained by CO2 changes or by ocean current changes.

Its the sun. Its the sun. Its the sun. Who will be the first extreme AGW high profile scientist to break ranks? When will the media take notice? When will the public start looking for scape goats? This would be fun, if it were not likely we may observe a Heinrich cycle rather than a Dansgaard-Oescgher cycle.

This graph shows cyclic past Dansgaard-Oesgher or Bond cycles. Note there are cycles in the paleoclimatic record of warming followed by cooling of high latitude Northern regions (Gerald Bond has able to track 23 of these cycles through the Holocene interglacial and into the last glacial cycle). In the 20th century there was also warming of high latitude Northern regions. The past warming and cooling cycles all correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes. There is no correlation with atmospheric CO2 changes. There is no correlation to changes in the North Atlantic drift current and these cycles. Correlation and/or the lack of correlation is a fundamental issue that must be explained by the hypothesis.

What is the AR4 explanation of the past warming and cooling cycles? What caused the warming followed by cooling? Magic wand? Why is there again and again correlation of the warming and cooling cycles with large changes in cosmogenic isotopes? (Changes in cosmogenic isotopes are caused by changes in the solar heliosphere or changes in the geomagnetic field.)

One does not need to be prescient to predict what will happen next. The past is a guide to the future. When the same solar magnetic cycle changes occur the planet will react in a similar manner. (Note the magnitude of the temperature decline will be greater due to the declining geomagnetic field and the rapidity of the solar magnetic cycle interruption.) The magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots is declining linearly. The solar magnetic cycle has been interrupted. There will be significant cooling at higher latitudes particular Northern Latitudes particularly in the winter. The first significant cooling is now observable. The masking mechanism that was delaying the cooling is finished. There will be a news worthy significant colder winter 2012/2013.

The gig is up for the extreme AGW paradigm. There will be no scientific explanation for the significant cooling. The cooling will continue.

Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. Corresponding changes in sunspot brightness and the strength of molecular absorption lines were also seen. This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.

Solar activity and Svalbard temperatures
The long temperature series at Svalbard (Longyearbyen) show large variations and a positive trend since its start in 1912. During this period solar activity has increased, as indicated by shorter solar cycles. The temperature at Svalbard is negatively correlated with the length of the solar cycle. The strongest negative correlation is found with lags 10–12 years. The relations between the length of a solar cycle and the mean temperature in the following cycle are used to model Svalbard annual mean temperature and seasonal temperature variations.
These models can be applied as forecasting models. We predict an annual mean temperature decrease for Svalbard of 3.5 to 2oC from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24 (2009–‐20) and a decrease in the winter temperature of ≈6 oC.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2000PA000571.shtml
On the 1470-year pacing of Dansgaard-Oeschger warm events
The oxygen isotope record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core was reanalyzed in the frequency and time domains. The prominent 1470-year spectral peak, which has been associated with the occurrence of Dansgaard-Oeschger interstadial events, is solely caused by Dansgaard-Oeschger events 5, 6, and 7. This result emphasizes the nonstationary character of the oxygen isotope time series. Nevertheless, a fundamental pacing period of ∼1470 years seems to control the timing of the onset of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. A trapezoidal time series model is introduced which provides a template for the pacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Statistical analysis indicates only a ≤3% probability that the number of matches between observed and template-derived onsets of Dansgaard-Oeschger events between 13 and 46 kyr B.P. resulted by chance. During this interval the spacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger onsets varied by ±20% around the fundamental 1470-year period and multiples thereof. The pacing seems unaffected by variations in the strength of North Atlantic Deep Water formation, suggesting that the thermohaline circulation was not the primary controlling factor of the pacing period.

February 23, 2012 at 3:16 pm
.”…In the same way I find it remarkable that so many here continue to engage Willie as if he were genuinely interested in advancing the scientific dialogue….”

Boston, for my part I answere that sentment here…
“David says:
February 22, 2012 at 11:48 pm

One further comment on why I think it is important to give serious arguments to Connely, and also point out his evasiveness and reiterate what he refuses to discuss.

From reading his posts here I consider his serious arguments to lack cogency. By this I mean he is only trying to confuse, and not to directly engage the post, Furthermore I do not trust him any more then Peter Gleick. It would not surprise me to see him do an article in the pro CAGW world, where he cherry picks (they do this well) his comments here and the responses, the purpose being to make sceptics appear ignorant or unwilling to debate.”

So you see, for the record it is good to try to corner such trolls to an actual conversation on the science, and to redirect them to the post, while factualy revealing their deductive reason failures.

A further two cent suggestions for the moderators. Poster with “one trick pony” agendas, such as the non heating ability of SWR, or those who insist that there is no GHE, should not be allowed to turn every post into a dialogue and debate over their pet peeve. Perhaps a Side Bar link could be set on the side, and such repetive debates, which distract from the subject of the article, could be redirected to that location with all further interactions similarly placed there..

I live at a high mountainous altitude in the American SW. Sometimes I get a significant amount of snow in the winter. When the sun comes out I notice how the snow melts. First it melts around dark objects exposed to the suns rays. rocks, tree trunks, foliage that stick through the snow. If I want to hasten the melting of the snow in a particular area, like a walkway, I put ashes from a fire over the snow/ice and it melts 3 times faster. Any dark object over the snow will make it melt faster around the object.

Conclusion: dark objects absorb more energy from the suns rays then light ones do, proof positive that the light is converted to LWR by absorption and emissivity. It’s why solar thermal collectors have black painted surfaces on the backboard and pipes.

Furthermore, if I wanted an ice covered ground to melt faster, I must pick the ice loose from it’s icy grip on the ground below allowing sun and warm air to get underneath the ice to melt it faster. The relatively warm water then accelerates the melting ice even more.

The CO2 ladened air of the dry cold air does next to nothing for the warming process. I live at around 6,000 ft. I have noticed that if you get a warm moist air mass from the pacific SW area the snow and ice will melt really fast, especially if it rains.

You fail at basic physics Myrrh you nut!

Lasers, ah a good example of how energy can be converted by absorption and emissivity. A laser has a medium that is pumped up with electrical energy to cause the lasing medium to jump up a level in it’s atomic energy levels, aka: an outer electron level jumps to a higher energy band orbit. When that electron collapses back to it neutral orbit shell a photon is admitted.

A conventional gas laser works by bouncing the photons from a polished mirror side to a semitransparent polished mirror side. This process of pumping electrical energy into the gas medium and the photons bouncing back and forth between the two mirror surfaces repeats until the light energy reaches a breakaway level and comes out the semitransparent side as an intense light energy source. Of course CO2 or cobalt lasers produce LWR energy and the process is somewhat different.

So we another example of absorption and emissivity.

I have a dish washing scrub brush that has a flat black rubber coat over the lower portion of an ivory white handle to the brush head. One day the sun had been shining on it as it hung from a cabinet over the sink next to a window in front of the sink. The black handle portion was very warm while the white portion was relatively cool. But if I moved it out of the direct sunlight and just exposed to the reflected and diffused light it would be at room temperature of 50-F. Another example of solar light energy being absorbed by by an object and converted to heat or LWIR.

I am wondering myself exactly why this is, and is there any artificial way to recreate the sunlight portion of the solar spectrum? (minus the UV and near or far IR). What is it about direct solar light energy that makes it so powerful, why it is essentially black objects that absorb it and white that reflect it? I just know it happens.

According to Myrrh’s explanations the Sun would revolve around the Earth in his explanation of how the Earths heating system works. Yes the AGWers have exaggerated the green house effect from the interaction of CO2 with H2O and other reactive gases in the atmosphere to solar energy, but it is what Ira basically shows of the GHE. The exact nature of GHG’s interactions seems to remain ambiguous on how they absorb and emit the solar energy.

My analogy of the green house effect would be a pool of heat reservoir fed by a spring that would be the sun. If I put sponges (CO2) around this perfectly circular and level pool then the outflow of water (HEAT) would be impeded and the water level would rise somewhat until a new equilibrium level was reached. If I put another ring of sponges in back of the the first ring the effect will be less then the initial. This is somewhat how the atmospheric GHG works but it is much more complicated.

A good reference site that gets down to the nitty gritty is found on these 3 web pages:

But it still doesn’t explain all factors of the physics and mechanics of the Earths atmosphere involving the GHE.

——————————————–

An experiment:

Take 3 shallow boxes with pipes going through them. The boxes are exposed to the environment of a dry sunny climate of either Nevada or Arizona. Each box is 10 meters off the ground to negate ground effects. Feeder pipes are insulated and come directly underneath from the ground.

Box A: It’s completely covered except for the bottom. The top and sides are of a mirrored surface.

Box B: Is covered except for the top with highly mirrored surface including the pipes.

Box C: Is like box B but its surfaces including the pipe is painted flat black.

Monitor the temperature of water flowing into separate respective tanks for 6 hours during prim solar irradiance.

Which reservoir do you expect to have the highest temperature or heat content?

Box A: Heated by the ambient air?

Box B: Heated by air and sunlight?

Box C: Heated by air and sunlight absorption?

Try it with jars in a similar setup and come back with the results.

This experiment could be modified for GHG effect using gases of various mixtures.

Dear WUWT moderators, the post Scottar says:February 23, 2012 at 7:16 pm is one example of dozens in this thread that are off topic. There is nothing wrong with Scottar’s post, it just does not belong here. If my recomendation just above Scottar’s post is not viable, then what else could be done?

> How does AR-4 explain the 23 cycles of warming followed by cooling that have been found in the paleoclimatic record

I don’t know. I’m not even sure that it is known.

> The past warming and cooling cycles all correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes.

You’ve said that several times, and I’ve asked for references, and you haven’t provided them. You’ve provided a link to a comment of yours which refs several papers, and all the ones I checked were irrelevant. So please, just provide a link to one (or more) relevant papers.

> http://www.climate4you.com/ See this link. Big picture, figure 3, which shows Greenland ice sheet temperatures over the last 12,000 years. Note the cyclic increases and decreases of high latitude temperatures which correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes

You haven’t shown the cosmogenic isotopes on that picture. Why not?

> The past warming and cooling cycles all correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes

David says:
February 23, 2012 at 7:09 pmA further two cent suggestions for the moderators. Poster with “one trick pony” agendas, such as the non heating ability of SWR, or those who insist that there is no GHE, should not be allowed to turn every post into a dialogue and debate over their pet peeve. Perhaps a Side Bar link could be set on the side, and such repetive debates, which distract from the subject of the article, could be redirected to that location with all further interactions similarly placed there..

Oh right, so those who insist there is no GHE should be sidelined according to those who haven’t proved any such thing exists and moreover say it exists because of some imaginative belief that, contrary to all empirical proven physics knowledge, SWR heats land and oceans?

I was adding to the opening post’s very strong condemnation of the IPCC’s fraud in taking out the Sun – the fraud goes further than that is my point, it has taken out the Sun because it has introduced a completely different fisics about it.

Now, you can take your unproven GHE effect and stuff it, or prove that it exists, but as long as Anthony allows free and open discussion on the science of this then the view that this too is a science fraud is fair to bring into such relevant discussions, the swapping of properties by giving shortwave the properties of heat, thermal infrared, is a sleight of hand deliberately contrived to further the agenda of those who created AGW.

To that end they have created a completely different fisics as can be seen in their claims for the imaginary GHE by their manipulation of the basics and touted in their cartoon energy budget, which they have spent the last decades introducing into mainstream education*. Because of this, those believing in GHE can’t see the simple disjunct between their claims, their fisics, and industry all around us falsifying that claim.

Perhaps you didn’t understand my example earlier, industry in its empirically proven real world physics sells specialised windows to block thermal infrared, the direct heat we feel from the Sun, and produces window to maximise the direct entry of visible light from the Sun. Why? It saves on air conditioning costs in areas where the Sun’s heat entering through windows is a problem. Can you see the disjunct yet between your GHE fisics and traditional physics reality? Go on, you too, go to these companies and tell them they are cheating their customers because it is visible light which heats up the rooms they claim will be cooler – you’ve got your cartoon greenhouse GHE fisics to prove they’re wrong..

When you can see the just how your claim about visible light will appear to them you’ll be on your way to recovery, having taken the first step out of the fictional world ‘they’ created through the looking glass with Alice in which you’re being kept in thrall.

Did you read this post on what other variable could have been left out?
UzUrBrain says:
February 22, 2012 at 10:50 am

Take a field trip to any one of those energy saving window outlets you see advertized on TV. Ask them to demonstrate one of their IR blocking windows. Note how they can have a Infrared heating element on one side of the window and you feel no heat at all on your side. Now, move the heating element around to the other side. Shazam, there is no heat on that side either. It works both ways. Why do the AGW left-wing-nuts ignore this? Are they ignoring the IR energy given off by the SUN? If the CO2 blocks the IR from leaving the earth doesn’t it block the IR energy from reaching the earth? EVERY graph, chart, pictorial representation I see shows NO IR energy striking the earth. WHY? Please explain.

Well, he thinks that it is decidely odd that there is no direct heat energy from the Sun striking the Earth in their energy budget cartoon…, (obviously another taught that the direct heat we feel from the Sun is the invisible thermal infrared as I gave from NASA’s traditional physics teaching), and if we’re feeling it how can the cartoon say it doesn’t reach the Earth’s surface? But as I’ve explained, this is deliberately manipulated fictional fisics to sell the AGW agenda** and to that end they have not only taken out the Sun as a variable, they have replaced it with their own version – they have given the properties of the actual thermal energy of the Sun which is heat, to shortwave, and so their claim that visible light heats land and oceans which in real world physics it can’t do.

Read the above. Until you can tell the difference between Heat and Light energies from the Sun, in traditional physics the empirically understood difference by category, you won’t even begin to make sense of your observations, and I don’t have the time to go through each individually. Stick to discovering the real differences between visible Light and the invisible thermal infrared Heat for yourself. I’ve given more than sufficient information for you to make a start, and, do this with the challenge I have given in mind which should help you concentrate your efforts. Industry falsifies your fisics, proof that your are touting a psuedo-science, not I. Remember, this is energy direct from the Sun, don’t get into a muddle with artificially enhanced lasers – if our Sun was a laser you wouldn’t be writing here and I wouldn’t be reading it…

William M. Connolley says:
February 23, 2012 at 9:34 am
“No, that wasn’t my link; someone else provided that. I did think of adding that I was discussing the observations, and didn’t believe the modelling stuff there – its only McI, after all, you can’t rely on it.”

You could do him the courtesy of spelling his name correctly. It won’t change his demeanor, which will continue to be perceived as arrogant, but that’s no excuse for failing a basic courtesy of spelling his name right.

“Yes, the raving nutters are making those merely nutty look bad by association.”

Curious which category you place yourself in? I have my own view, but I’ll just point out that Dr Misckolczi gives the effect of 2xCO2 as 0.0°C. Several other well respected climatologists and scientists give numbers of less than 0.5°C per doubling – such a minuscule effect that for all practical purposes it might as well be zero. Even a 1°C rise would be a net benefit to humanity. Warmth is good; cold kills. Only mendacious propagandists claim otherwise.

And with essentially no warming over the past decade and a half [while harmless, beneficial CO2 continues rising], it’s clear that the CO2=CAGW conjecture is being falsified by Planet Earth herself. Who should we believe? The alarmist nutters who are being proven wrong? Or Mother Gaia – the ultimate Authority?

Furthermore, if I wanted an ice covered ground to melt faster, I must pick the ice loose from it’s icy grip on the ground below allowing sun and warm air to get underneath the ice to melt it faster. The relatively warm water then accelerates the melting ice even more.

Very good – I’ve been looking for something that shows visible light can heat something. Given water is a good absorber of LWIR (hmm, I better check the spectrum for near-IR), this shows light heating the ground. Quite usable here in New England. The only other analogy I have at hand was my experience with burning holes in black paper with an argon laser, but most people haven’t had that privilege. Getting ice off the driveway, too much experience.

Other demonstrations welcome!

The CO2 ladened air of the dry cold air does next to nothing for the warming process. I live at around 6,000 ft. I have noticed that if you get a warm moist air mass from the pacific SW area the snow and ice will melt really fast, especially if it rains.

Here’s something to watch for – note the effect dew point has on the melt rate. If it’s above freezing, water vapor will condense on the snow releasing the vapor’s latent heat, which goes directly into melting. If it’s below freezing, only conduction from the air melts the snow surface and the snow hangs around much longer.

Of course, if you don’t have a dew point gauge, Anthony’s company will be glad to sell you a Davis Vantage Pro II with solar UV sensor (you want to track that too, right?). :-)

I can’t agree, Alec. The earth is a mechanical heat engine. If I have a steam locomotive that runs on a heat-source (burning fuel), which then produces both mechanical motion & waste heat, magnetism isn’t going to affect it, no matter how powerful (let alone the admittedly large (size) but locally weak magnetic field of the earth). It just doesn’t figure.

I was adding to the opening post’s very strong condemnation of the IPCC’s fraud in taking out the Sun – the fraud goes further than that is my point, it has taken out the Sun because it has introduced a completely different fisics about it.

You refer to real-world physics, so I infer that fisics is a silly contraction of “fake fisics”, and that there are multiple fake physics. Do you have a list of fisics you’ve observed?

The other Phil says:
February 23, 2012 at 1:05 pm
“Typhoon noted some legitimate concerns about the graphic from woodfortrees. Yes, if this were a peer-reviewed journal, one would get rejected for failing to include the error bars, failing to identify whether a fit other than linear was appropriate and various other problems. However, in the context of the assertion that “lower tropospheric global temperature has not changed based on satellite data” ”

Error analysis in science is not an arbitrary afterthought, without it an experimental result is meaningless as there is no way to determine if the result is different from the null hypothesis.

“do you seriously think that addition of error bars could possibly support the contention that the true slope could be flat?”

It depends on the size of the error bars.
.
The slope in the linear model is about 0.0125 °C / year.

By way of illustration,

If a proper error analysis gives an error of

0.013 °C / year +/- 0.021 °C / year, then the slope is probably no different from the null hypothesis of 0.0 °C / year is a statistically significant manner.

Simply fitting a line to data without the accomapnying analysis of error tells one nothing.
The only thing that it is good for is fooling oneself.

“The warmists should be challenged when making unsupportable assertions, but so should the skeptics. Contending that the global temperature is statistically flat over the last 30 years is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence, not a flat assertion that flies in the face of evidence.”

Climate science, so-called, is the only field in the physical sciences I’ve encountered wherein error analysis is considered an option.

Another point regarding this temperature time series plot that is relevant to the original observation of Alec Rawls regarding omitted variable fraud.

We know that one of dips in the data is due to transient volcanic actvity, Mt. Pinatubo

and that the super el Nino peak is also a transient nature phenomena. Neither phenomena, which drive the linear least squares fit to the graph, have anything to do with global warming trends.

Yet the simpler linear model does not take these variables into account.

“You are saying that your hypothesis should be accepted until it is falsified. Science usually works the other way around –> a hypothesis is not accepted until it is verified.”

Wrong, where do you get your information? A hypothesis is put forth in order to be falsified. That’s the entire purpose. If it is falsified, it is restated and tried again. If it cannot avoid falsification, it is discarded.

But if a hypothesis withstands all attempts at falsification, it is on its way to becoming an accepted theory. So get busy, Tim, and try to falsify the hypothesis. If you can’t, you are obliged under the scientific method to accept that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. Are you up to the challenge?

Another point… transient volcanic actvity, Mt. Pinatubo http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_January_2012.png and that the super el Nino peak is also a transient nature phenomena. Neither phenomena, which drive the linear least squares fit to the graph, have anything to do with global warming trends. Yet the simpler linear model does not take these variables into account.

Markus Fitzhenry says:
February 24, 2012 at 12:52 am
Does the oceans warm the atmosphere or does the atmosphere warm the oceans?

Henry@Markus
Is that a trick question?

It is the sun that heats the waters. A large portion of same heat is then used to convert water to water vapor.
For instance, I observed that in my 50m2 pool, 2500 liters of water evaporated in one week whilst there were no leaks, no swimming/splashing, no discharge, & no clouds. (Compare this to the 40 liters of patrol (gas) I use in a month…).
Eventually that water vapor condenses again releasing all that heat back in the atmosphere whereever it condenses.
So basically, it the sun that both heats the oceans and the atmosphere and it is the oceans that keep the temperature of the atmosphere around us more or less constant. (picture earth as a giant water cooling plant)

William Astley asks”William Connolley will not answer these questions. William why will you not answer these questions?

To be fair, no one can be expected to be an expert on all factors that have affected earths climate throughout all of history. Furthermore, there is only so much time in a day. Whether or not you agree with his statements, William Connolley is perfect welcome to only answer the questions he finds worth answering. Your questions are fairly extensive, but you have not provided the links to research papers to allow others to know precisely what you are basing your claims on. You could help out by answering HIS questions to move the conversation forward.

> 0.013 °C / year +/- 0.021 °C / year, then the slope is probably no different from the null hypothesis of 0.0 °C / year is a statistically significant manner.

I agree. It would be nice to see the error bars on this graph, or some graph of the last 30 years global temps. I’ll be quite surprised if the error bars are large enough such that flat cannot be rejected, but my experience is that error bars often exceed what seems plausible to the naked eye, so I could be wrong. Surely, someone, somewhere, has done the calculation?

So if some magnetic or other forcefield changes the movement of clouds, be it ever so slight, so that esarth’s major cloud banks move, say, more toward the poles instead of towards equator, earth will get warmer.
Why, do you ask? Exactly at the equator sunshine is 684 W/m2 directly overhead; on average it is 342 W/m2, and it goes lower towards the poles.
So, you can see what an enormous difference a little movement of the clouds can make.
(I am assuming you know that where the clouds are, a lot of sunlight is deflected away from earth to space, making us down below a bit cooler….)

Henry@Markus
Interesting to add to my previous post.
Somebody did some calculations and estimated that 23% of all incoming sunlight is used to convert water to water vapor. (Roempps Chemie lexicon). That is a lot.

Please don’t ban William Connelly. He only undermines himself and his cause at this point with each post. The fact that he fails to realize this is eclipsed only by his complete inability to notice an entire page of well-sourced refutations of his arguments.

This is very instructive to the casual observer and those who values facts, evidence, and scientific principle over a petulant, arrogant, blowhard in partial command of a fraction of the facts.

Henry says
I am sure you mean trend and not model?
That is not a bad result. That is about what I get. But I am afraid I do not follow your talk about the error.
Let us do a thought experiment.
Average temps. where people live is around 15 degrees C. Look on your calibration certificate of your thermometer or thermo-couple an you will find, for example, an error indication of 0.1 degrees C for between 10 and 25 degrees C. Percentagewise on the 15, that works out to 0.1/15 x 100 = 0.67%
now,
0.67% of your slope on your linear trend line equals 0.0067 x 0.013 =0.000087
So if someone were to ask me to give an error indication of my own global result
I would say, the temperature during the past 35 years has increased by about 0.0137 +/- 0.0001 degree C per annum

That does not exclude the possibility that during those 35 years measurement collection and accuracy may have improved considerably, probably more biasedly so towards the higher temps.,
but that is a different investigation altogether, and I don’t know if anyone has ever done such an investigation, yet.

Another point… transient volcanic actvity, Mt. Pinatubo http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_January_2012.png and that the super el Nino peak is also a transient nature phenomena. Neither phenomena, which drive the linear least squares fit to the graph, have anything to do with global warming trends. Yet the simpler linear model does not take these variables into account.

An excellent point, which has already been thought of.

Oh? Extracting – separating out – transient spikes from a time series data set is easier said than done. What is the shape of the tail distribution? How long does it extend into the future?

In other words, any such attempt is very highly model dependent and thus subject to large systematic errors and low sensitivity.

That is certainly true. However that does not negate the fact that not much has happened over the last 15 years. The HadCrut3 anomaly for 1998 was 0.548. But it was 0.137 in 1996. Now I know that there are different estimates as to how much warming ought to be occurring, but let us assume an average of 0.03/year over the last 15 years. This should add 0.45 over 15 years. So even though 2011 was a La Nina year, it should still have come out at 0.137 + 0.45 = 0.587 and so it should have beaten 1998. As we know, it was 0.34, so even though it was a relatively warm year for a La Nina, it came no where close to projections.

AGW_Skeptic requests: “Please tell me what the ideal average global temperature is and why. Please tell me what the ideal average CO2 level is and why.”

Those are some of those “wicked problems” I was referring to. But let me play devil’s advocate and answer “the ideal values are what the earth experienced in the ‘recent’ past.”

From a purely anthropocentric view, civilization arose in conditions similar to those we have experienced for ~ the last 10,000 years. Modern civilization arose in the conditions we have experienced for the last few hundred years. According to wikipedia “Anatomically modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, reaching full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago.” There was at least one other interglacial period in the last 200,000 years, but this did not give rise to civilization. That would suggest that the current interglacial with its unusually steady temperatures is somehow “ideal”.

Furthermore, from an economic perspective, we have built up infrastructure around current conditions. The crops we raise and the places we live are tuned to current temperatures and rainfalls. Yes, people adapt; yes, people could move their cites 10 miles inland if sea levels rise; yes, we could switch crops around. But that would not be cheap.

At some level, you could argue it comes down to “if it ain’t broke, don;t fix it.” We know that people thrive in current conditions. “Fixing” the earth by raising temperatures and raising CO2 is “breaking” something that we know works. It is possible that a slightly warmer temperature would be better. It is certainly true that many plants grow better with more CO2.

But then there is the “law of unintended consequences”. What unknows will we be setting in motion by changing the world? This is the only “experiment” we get, so we ought to be pretty sure before we go and tamper with it too much. (This is sort of the converse to the “omitted variable problem”. In both cases, we may well be leaving out something that should be considered; some thing that might be very important.)

Your turn. What do YOU think are the ideal temperature and CO2 levels?

The Omitted Variable Problem was once taught early in the series of courses on statistics. The physical example may no longer be true, but here it is anyhow:
The sale of umbrellas in New York City is strongly correlated with egg production in South Africa.

Certainly it works both ways. Evidence is sought to confirm OR reject a hypothesis. In many cases it is not as simple as either rejecting or accepting a hypothesis, but rather refining a hypothesis to more closely agree with observations.

Ideally, the investigators are impartial, responding to evidence that is both pro and con (quite different from the legal system, where attorneys on each side typically present ONLY the information they think will help their side). Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, people do tend to have blinders that focus their attention on those facts that support their “side” of a scientific debate. This gets back directly to the top post, where the claim is that AGW proponents are ignoring a viable hypothesis (either due simply to their subconcious “blinders” or through intentional fraud).

So — back to your hypothesis: “CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. More is better.” Well I can falsify that easily with the following info about CO2:

1% can cause drowsiness with prolonged exposure.[7]
At 2% it is mildly narcotic and causes increased blood pressure and pulse rate, and causes reduced hearing.[74]
At about 5% it causes stimulation of the respiratory center, dizziness, confusion and difficulty in breathing accompanied by headache and shortness of breath.[74] Panic attacks may also occur at this concentration.[76][77]
At about 8% it causes headache, sweating, dim vision, tremor and loss of consciousness after exposure for between five and ten minutes.[74]
from wikipedia

So clearly when “more” = 8%, it is NOT better — certainly not for people. So now YOU need to refine (not throw out) your hypothesis. You need to clarify how much more is better — perhaps propose an ideal value. Hopefully you will also present ALL data you have so that others can judge your new, improved hypothesis.

Tim Folkerts says
Your turn. What do YOU think are the ideal temperature and CO2 levels?
dear Tim
I hear what you say
but you are still assuming that (more) CO2 still does something to our temps.
Unfortunately or fortunately, whichever you prefer,
it does not.

CO2 is a natural gas, like oxygen, and life itsself depends on it. It does nothing to temps.
It is not a poison. People that die of too much CO2 died because of a lack of oxygen.
The warming of the past 4 decades was due to natural causes
as explained to conman Connally earlier in this thread.

Your turn. What do YOU think are the ideal temperature and CO2 levels?

Can anyone play? Thanx:

2° – 3° warmer would be ideal. But even 5° warmer is no problem. The planet has been that warm in the past without “climate disruption”. Note that the increased temperatures would happen at night, and the minimums would be raised much more than the maximums, and the equator would remain fairly steady, but the high latitudes would get the advantage of more warming. A warmer earth would open up millions of acres of new farmland, from Canada to Mongolia to Alaska to Russia. A warmer planet would be a net benefit to humanity and to the biosphere.

And CO2 levels? The biosphere is currently starved of CO2. If CO2 was 900 – 1000 ppmv in the atmosphere, it would have zero effect on human health, and it would not even be noticeable to us. It would still be a very tiny trace gas, measured in parts per million. But the biosphere would notice, as it already has: the planet is greening due to more beneficial CO2. The Greens [actually being Reds] hate the fact that no global harm can be attributed to human CO2 emissions. Normal people would rejoice in the fact that the CO2=CAGW conjecture is being falsified – by the planet itself. But the eco-kleptocrats want climate disruption, because it would help perpetuate their scam. They are not going to get it. The planet has been through this scenario repeatedly, with no ill effects.

And enough with the false canard about “This is the only “experiment” we get”. Wrong. CO2 has been much higher many times in the past. Actually, CO2 has been much higher through most of geologic history. Temperatures have been much higher, too [and also much colder] The only correlation is that CO2 levels rise after temperatures rise. Rising CO2 does not precede rising temperatures. What does that tell you?

It is time for you to acknowledge that the entire “carbon” scare has no empirical basis in the real world. It is being falsified by the planet. Invoking the so-called ‘law of unintended consequences’ is a complete copout, because that ‘law’ applies to every possible action. It is the antithesis of the scientific method, which was constructed to discover scientific truth, and with that knowledge, avoid as many problems as possible. CO2 is not a problem, either now or at projected levels [which will not double from here; there isn’t enough fossil fuel to make that happen, and the biosphere’s expansion is soaking up much of the excess].

Unless you can falsify the testable hypothesis that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere, then with passing time and increased knowledge that hypothesis will become a theory, able to predict how much more food can be grown with the projected increase, how much more rainfall can be expected, etc.

It is time for those on the warmist side to admit that none of their dire predictions have come to pass, and that more CO2 is a good thing. Scientific skeptics have the facts to back up those assertions; alarmists always turn out to be wrong. It takes courage to admit that all your predictions were wrong, and to reassess your position in that light. Maybe you can admit it. But not many of your fellow travelers can.

Based upon the smoothed annual sequence, the hypothesis that the trend is flat can be rejected. Interestingly, that isn’t quite so obvious from the annual or monthly series, although it is not easy to tell from the graph. Maybe someone can look at the data file and conclude more definitively.

The other thing the Greens (Reds) are vehemently opposed to is abundant, reliable and cheap power (electricity & gas). They don’t want to see the poor and suffering of the planet improve their quality of life – they want to destroy ours.

1% can cause drowsiness with prolonged exposure.[7]
At 2% it is mildly narcotic and causes increased blood pressure and pulse rate, and causes reduced hearing.[74]
At about 5% it causes stimulation of the respiratory center, dizziness, confusion and difficulty in breathing accompanied by headache and shortness of breath.[74] Panic attacks may also occur at this concentration.[76][77]
At about 8% it causes headache, sweating, dim vision, tremor and loss of consciousness after exposure for between five and ten minutes.[74]
from wikipedia

Tim, this information is incorrect.
I am quoting from Roempps chemie lexicon, look it up under Kohlendioksied
They did labtests with animals where they varied the CO2 content and they found that if they took it to as high as 65% (they did not go further) but they left oxygen content at normal 21%, the animals would not die.
The description you and wikipedia give is in fact typical of a lack of oxygen:
i.e. if you take the CO2 content from its current 0.04% up to 10%
then oxygen drops by 10%, or more, because CO2 is heavier, and it might not be that quickly distributed evenly in the area where you are.
Anyway, it is as if you went up a mountain at a very fast speed.

Atmospheric pressure at sea level – 1013 mb
0.92 * 1013 = 931 mb which would be found at an altitude of about 0.7 km

Mt Everest is about 8,848 m high, and people climb that without oxygen
At that altitude, the expected pressure is about 314 mb

314 / 1013 = 31% of sea level

Therefore, this disproves your assertion that people die at 8% CO2 because of “a lack of oxygen”. In fact, this is the reason that CO2 scrubbers work, they just have to remove the CO2 because there is plenty of oxygen.

“Variations in the total solar irradiance (TSI) associated with solar activity have been argued to influence the Earth’s climate system, in particular when solar activity deviates from the average for a substantial period. One such example is the 17th Century Maunder Minimum during which sunspot numbers were extremely low, as Earth experienced the Little Ice Age. Estimation of the TSI during that period has relied on extrapolations of correlations with sunspot numbers or even more indirectly with modulations of galactic cosmic rays. We argue that there is a minimum state of solar magnetic activity associated with a population of relatively small magnetic bipoles which persists even when sunspots are absent, and that consequently estimates of TSI for the Little Ice Age that are based on scalings with sunspot numbers are generally too low. The minimal solar activity, which measurements show to be frequently observable between active-region decay products regardless of the phase of the sunspot cycle, was approached globally after an unusually long lull in sunspot activity in 2008–2009. Therefore, the best estimate of magnetic activity, and presumably TSI, for the least-active Maunder Minimum phases appears to be provided by direct measurement in 2008–2009. The implied marginally significant decrease in TSI during the least active phases of the Maunder Minimum by 140 to 360 ppm relative to 1996 suggests that drivers other than TSI dominate Earth’s long-term climate change.”

I remain curious, however, about the variability of the solar wind and magnetic influence. In respect to the solar wind/magnetic field, however, would not its effects extend to the heliopause (albeit more diffuse)? Would this introduce consideration of some sort of lag in any time-series data comparison?

HenryP says:“I hear what you say but you are still assuming that (more) CO2 still does something to our temps.
I think you will find yourself in VERY rare company if you say rising CO2 levels have NO effect on temperature. The AMOUNT of warming is debatable: I have seen numbers from as low as ~ 0.5 C (eg from the noted skeptic Lindzen). This is well below the ~ 3 C that IPCC thinks is correct. But I have seen no serious estimates that say the answer is zero. Do you have serious calculations that support absolutely zero effect?

“CO2 is a natural gas, like oxygen, and life itself depends on it. It does nothing to temps.”
This is a non sequitur. Yes, it is natural. Yes, life depends on it. Neither of those two facts have anything to do with its affect on climate.

I can address at least some of what you said there.“… and also how much cooling is caused by the CO2 by taking part in photo synthesis.”
Almost zero. Photosynthesis does indeed absorb some energy to build plants. But that energy is released when the plant decays/gets eaten. The only NET effect would be a NET sequestration of organic matter. For the most part, plants that are growing now are simply replacing plants that had recently died. To the extent that forests (high mass) are replaced by crops (low mass), we are releasing energy, not storing it — we are warming the planet by “undoing” the photosynthesis that had built the trees. To the extent the earth is “greening” and plants as a whole are growing better, then there would be some cooling.

I’m out of time for now — but we could also work backwards. How much wood would you need to account for even 0.01 W/m^2 of absorbed energy for 1 year? I suspect the number is staggering; it should be easy to get a ball-park estimate.

Sorry but your conclusion is flawed. The pressure on Everest is far lower than at sea level, but that doesn’t reduce the percentage of oxygen in the air. You cannot make the conclusion you drew. (And while it doesn’t necessarily prove anything, I suspect I’m one of the few in this discussion who have been on an 8K meter peak, so I have more than passing interest in the action of oxygen at altitude.)

INHALATION EFFECTS:
Carbon dioxide is the most powerful cerebral vasodilator known. Inhaling large concentrations causes rapid circulatory insufficiency leading to coma and death. Asphyxiation is likely to occur before the effects of carbon dioxide overexposure. Chronic, harmful effects are not known from repeated inhalation of low concentrations. Low concentrations of carbon dioxide cause increased respiration and headache.

If we go to 1 W/m^2, which would be significant for global energy balance, then we are up to ~ 2 extra kilograms of plant matter for every square meter of the world. And this needs to be continuously accumulated without decaying or getting eaten.

On the other hand, the total mass of biological matter is about 2E15 kg (http://energy.saving.nu/biomass/basics.shtml) and the total surface area is 5e14, so there is currently about 4 kg/m^2
of biomass on earth (and this is very close to balanced, with new plants & animals replacing old plants and animals). There is NO WAY that “greening” of the earth is suddenly throwing this out of balance by 50% every year.

Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, it displaces oxygen, how much oxygen is available isn’t the point here – it’s how much can get into the lungs.

Some facts about carbon dioxide (carbon dioxide isn’t a toxic, it suffocates if in large enough quantity to displace oxygen. And no stupid responses from anyone please, carbon dioxide is not a poison which is what toxic means, by AGW fisics someone suffocated by a pillow would have been poisoned..)

“It’s common knowledge that when we breathe we take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide but what is not generally known is that we are greatly affected by the level of carbon dioxide in the air we breathe as well as the way we breathe. Because many people with a wide range of health problems find relief when given enhanced levels of carbon dioxide, it follows that these people would benefit from any rise in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The importance of CO2 and proper breathing is nicely covered in the following audio lecture and followed with scientific references.

Source: http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/pns/faq_othr.html Levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), a colorless, odorless gas, have been known to reach 3,000 parts per million (ppm) in homes, schools, and offices with no ill effects. The maximum recommended by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) for an 8-hour occupation is 5,000 ppm (13 times the current level of 380 ppm). The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) also use 5,000 ppm as their threshold for occupational safety.

But 5,000 ppm appears to be a very conservative estimate of safe levels because other sources claim we can tolerate up to 1.5% of it in air, 15,000 parts per million.

Consider: people with respiratory problems are given medical gas typically consisting of 95 percent oxygen and 50,000 ppm (5 percent) carbon dioxide. This gas can also be obtained with CO2 ranging from 1% to as high as 10% for treating people who have been asphyxiated.

Also consider: we would die if we did not breathe in such a way as to retain very close to 65,000 ppm (6.5%) of CO2 in the alveoli (tiny air sacs) of our lungs.”

“Consider: people with respiratory problems are given medical gas typically consisting of 95 percent oxygen and 50,000 ppm (5 percent) carbon dioxide. This gas can also be obtained with CO2 ranging from 1% to as high as 10% for treating people who have been asphyxiated.” [Myrrh: because without enough carbon dioxide in our lungs we can’t utilise oxygen.]

“Altitude sickness is caused by hyperventilation, which results in increased oxygen (O2) in the blood but decreased CO2. (Note: oxygen (O) occurs as a molecule in nature, hence the symbol O2) The lowered CO2 will not allow the increased O2 to be utilized. Adjusting to this condition is called “ventilatory acclimatization”. While it is not completely understood all that happens during this process, it has been observed by experimentation that supplementing CO2 prevents this acclimatization as well as preventing the sickness. It appears that respiratory distress due to lower levels of O2 (requiring ventilatory acclimatization) can be relieved or eliminated by the application of a higher level of CO2.”

“This might be a good time to ask: since we exhale CO2, why do we need it to be present in the air we inhale? Good question, but apparently, we do as demonstrated by the above experiment. Other experiments found that simply circulating CO2 up one nostril and out the other while the subject held their breath cured migraine headaches as well as allergic symptoms. Other researchers propose administering CO2 to people who suffer from epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and autism as well. Clearly, we are affected by low levels of CO2 in the air we breathe and need to acclimatize to these low levels, if we can, but not everyone can. Consider:

ı People who experience periodic breathing as well as apnea (cessation of breathing) during sleep benefit from higher levels of CO2. These conditions affect a lot of older people.

ı Increased levels of CO2 can improve the sleep of young people as well. One study found that healthy young men on a submarine slept well when CO2 levels rose but not as well when the levels dropped.

ı Furthermore it’s administered in the form of medical gas (1% to 10%) for many medical conditions to stimulate respiration. For example, people with asthma require from 3% to 5% for therapeutic effect.

Studies suggest that a lower level than this but somewhat higher than present atmospheric levels would prevent the attacks in the first place and prevent subclinical symptoms associated with asthma such as anxiety, insomnia, immune dysfunction and excessive sensitivity to pain. CO2 levels higher than 5 per cent are used for extreme cases such as for treating victims of asphyxiation and to stimulate breathing of newborn infants as well as speeding recovery of patients who have been anesthetized.”

[Myrrh. hyperventilation for whatever reason results in too much carbon dioxide being breathed out and falling to danger levels, around 4%. What happens, as in an asthma attack, is the body’s natural defences kick in to stop expelling carbon dioxide, and this is what appears to be that the person can’t breath in enough air – the body is trying to retain carbon dioxide so the more than sufficient oxygen it has in the lungs can be utilised.Paper bag remedy.. ]

David says:
February 23, 2012 at 7:09 pm
A further two cent suggestions for the moderators. Poster with “one trick pony” agendas, such as the non heating ability of SWR, or those who insist that there is no GHE, should not be allowed to turn every post into a dialogue and debate over their pet peeve. Perhaps a Side Bar link could be set on the side, and such repetive debates, which distract from the subject of the article, could be redirected to that location with all further interactions similarly placed there..
====================================================

Oh right, so those who insist there is no GHE should be sidelined according to those who haven’t proved any such thing exists and moreover say it exists because of some imaginative belief that, contrary to all empirical proven physics knowledge, SWR heats land and oceans?

I was adding to the opening post’s very strong condemnation of the IPCC’s fraud in taking out the Sun – the fraud goes further than that is my point, it has taken out the Sun because it has introduced a completely different fisics about it.

Now, you can take your unproven GHE effect and stuff it, or prove that it exists, but as long as Anthony allows free and open discussion on the science of this then the view that this too is a science fraud is fair to bring into such relevant discussions,….”
================================================
Myrrh, you were adding nothing to the opening post’s condemnation of the IPCC. You were in fact distracting from it on this post, and many others. Further, seeing that your perspective is not respected by many sceptical scientists, your continuing to turn every post into Myrrh’s debate, is providing fodder for the Connelly’s of the world to further pull attention away from the opening post. All of the above has nothing to do with the veracity of your thoughts. Any decent General picks and chooses his battlefield. Only a reckless, doomed to defeat, General fights on every field.

Typhoon says:
February 24, 2012 at 2:27 pm
Well, it’s not what I was looking for which is the satellite based temperature data with global coverage which is available back to only 1979.

I wish I could help more. But I played around with the data and graphs and found that if I plotted both UAH and RSS and then offset the UAH by + 0.09, the trend lines virtually match over the complete time. However individual spikes vary a huge amount! I know this does not totally answer your question, but look at the graphs and perhaps you or someone else can figure out how to get more useful information out of them.

Henry@Tim &@ all (toxicity of CO2)
David, I find Myrrh’s contributions mostly amusing and the blog would not be the same without him.
Anyway, his contribution about the non-toxicity of CO2 was thoughtfull and well researched.
I am not saying that this discussion about the toxocity of CO2 was on topic, but it flowed naturally from a challenge made by Tim, to tell us how much CO2 would be ideal.
Tim still believes CO2 is toxic, now with a quote from Google. To quote from that quote he made:
“Asphyxiation (=lack of oxygen) is likely to occur before the effects of carbon dioxide overexposure.”
Tim, that sentence means exactly what I have been trying to tell you: you will die of a lack of oxygen before you will note the other (real) effects by too much CO2. That is what the animal tests show. But now I found, on the internet that they have hidden those test results on the animals again. Anyway, you can look it up for yourself in Roempps Chemie Lexicon.
Obviously, with any substance, even if it is non-toxic, like sugar or salt, you might still die or get very sick if you take it in extreme concentration levels. I think that is common sense. The main point was to show that CO2 is non-toxic; to translate from the German: “inhaling large amounts of CO2 is harmful because it dilutes the required oxygen content. SWL=9000mg/m3. Mammals exposed to air containing 20% CO2 become drowsy, at 30% they die (due to asphyxiation!, do you understand that now?) . Nevertheless, rabbits have been shown to live in an atmosphere of 65% CO2 when at the same time enough oxygen was provided. ….& .the conclusion is : dass CO2 als solches kaum ernsthaft giftig sein kann”. The CO2 is not a poisonous, in moderate quantities. In fact, we even drink CO2 everyday, in our cool drinks. I rest my case here (on this subject).
Anyway, if we go from the current 0.04% of CO2 to 8 or 10% we are looking at the problem (of chosing an ideal CO2 content) unrealisticly. That will never happen.
The SWL of 9000 mg/m3 works out to 0.75%.
Note that they are already adding 0.8% (the maximum) in green houses to stimulate growth
I therefore think we can safely allow it to go up from 0.04% to 0.4%.?
I think that if we did this that more benefit will come to the biosphere.
Who agrees with me?

Tim Folkerts says:
I think you are being a little too confident to state categorically it was “due to natural causes”. You would have to rule out conclusively that people did not affect warming.

Tim, my advice to you is to forget about everyone who want to prove things with “calculations”.
Only trust your own tests and measurements
If you want to prove me wrong, bring me the test results of how much radiative warming and how much radiative cooling is caused by the CO2 and how much cooling is caused by CO2by the increase in photosynthesis over the past 40 years,
I need that all in the right dimensions, and tested in the proper concentration range.
My finding is that no one has tested it, in fact no one even knows what the correrct dimenions are of the test results that I am after.

Anywaym, Tim, I did address this issue in this thread.
My (null) hypothesis is that the effect of more CO2 and more GHG’s is zero. I also believe the influence of earth (volcanic activity, etc) is more or less constant (zero) and I also believe that any direct warming of earth by man is more or less zero.
At least, for the past 3-4 decades.
How do I know?
I studied the pattern of warming over the past 4 decades.
namely, in any of the 3 cases above, if they were not zero, the natural pattern you expect to observe, is that minimum temperatures (that happen during the night) must push up the average temperature.
That is not happening.
In fact, the opposite is happening.
I started this blog with this argument,https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/22/omitted-variable-fraud-vast-evidence-for-solar-climate-driver-rates-one-oblique-sentence-in-ar5/#comment-900337

It is the maxima (that happen during the day) that has been pushing up average temperatures. And even the graphs quoted to me by Connally have confirmed that trend (follow the red lines in fig. 3.38 of the AR4 report: the frequency of colder nights is increasing and the frequency of warmer nights are decreasing).

Posiible causes for the observed warming are:
1) more intense sunshine
and/or
2) less clouds
and/or
3) less ozone shielding, allowing more (UV) light in
There might be more causes.

Sorry but your conclusion is flawed. The pressure on Everest is far lower than at sea level, but that doesn’t reduce the percentage of oxygen in the air.

I agree, the percentage does not change with altitude.

However, the partial pressure does. Think of it as “the number of molecules per breath”. When you use an oxygen tank at altitude, it is the “the number of molecules per breath” that increases – the partial pressure, not the actual pressure.

That said, I agree that the data I presented does not really support my conclusions. I have done some additional computations. Assuming that atmospheric O2 is 20.9%,
if you burn enough to get 8% CO2
20.9 – 8 = 12.9 %
If you simply diluted the amount of oxygen by adding CO2, then
20.9 * 0.92 = 19.2%
The equivalent amount on Everest (314 mb)
20.9 * 0.31 = 6.48 % at sea level (the actual ratio is still 20.9%)

Thus, if 8% CO2 is fatal (yes, I know other posts have questioned that), then the mechanism is not from a lack of oxygen. The reason I mentioned rebreathers above is that that technology demonstrates that it is too much CO2 that is the problem, not the lack of oxygen.

Myrrh, you were adding nothing to the opening post’s condemnation of the IPCC. You were in fact distracting from it on this post, and many others. Further, seeing that your perspective is not respected by many sceptical scientists, your continuing to turn every post into Myrrh’s debate, is providing fodder for the Connelly’s of the world to further pull attention away from the opening post. All of the above has nothing to do with the veracity of your thoughts. Any decent General picks and chooses his battlefield. Only a reckless, doomed to defeat, General fights on every field.

Running scared? I must be winning.

Taken up my challenge yet? Let us know what these companies say to you when you tell them that by making their windows 30% (one example) more efficient at bringing through visible light while blocking thermal infrared that they are making the rooms hotter not colder as they claim, because your greenhouse cartoon proves that visible light heats matter….

Idiotic fisics is one thing, that there are those believe idiotic fisics is another, but here the subject of the piece is the deliberate FRAUD, of those creating the idiotic fisics.

How did you miss that being stressed in the opening post? Blocked it from mind, somehow? Scared to face to implications that, besides anything else, you’ve been conned into believing the Earth is flat? The GHE meme is a deliberate FRAUD.

Do read the piece again, it excellently deconstructs the IPCC fraud on the missing variable the Sun – here’s some snippets you appear to have missed to get you in the mood, my bold:

“My training is in economics where we are very familiar with what statisticians call “the omitted variable problem” (or when it is intentional, “omitted variable fraud”). Whenever an explanatory variable is omitted from a statistical analysis, its explanatory power gets misattributed to any correlated variables that are included. This problem is manifest at the very highest level of AR5, and is built into each step of its analysis.”

“Given what I found—systematic fraud—it would not be moral to honor this un-agreed to request, and because my comments are about what is omitted, the fraud is easy enough to expose without quoting the draft.”

“Introduction to the “omitted variable fraud” critique, continued”

“Okay, I guess that means I’m ready to wrap up. Y’all have taken all these tens of billions in research money and used it perpetrate a fraud. As I have documented above, you have perpetrated the grandest and most blatant example of omitted variable fraud in history, but so far only the skeptic half the world knows it. You still have a shot, before global cooling is an established fact, to make a rapid turn around and save some shred of your reputations. But if AR5 comes out insisting that CO2 is a dominant warming influence just as global cooling is proving that the dominant climate driver is our now-quiet sun, then you all are finished on the spot. You’ll still have your filthy lucre, but the tap is going to turn off, and your reputations will be destroyed forever.”

“Can you imagine a worse juxtaposition? Still waging war on CO2 as the sun is already proving that CO2 is entirely beneficial? And this is what the evidence says is going to happen, all of that evidence that you have been so studiously omitting. I’m eager for your embarrassment, but I would much rather see you save yourselves, so that the needed policy reversals can some [come] that much sooner. The anti-CO2 policies that your fraudulent “science” has supported are right now destroying the world economy. You idiots are killing our future. Please wake up and try to save your own reputations before your lunatic anti-science ruins us all.”

How did you miss that being stressed in the opening post? Blocked it from mind, somehow? Scared to face to implications that, besides anything else, you’ve been conned into believing the Earth is flat?

I would like to see this deconstruction circulated to every single participant in the IPCC process, to every newspaper and tv station, to every teacher in every school.., but especially to every member of those science bodies that have now nailed their flag to the mast of this fraud.

I have shown that this FRAUD is deliberate throughout its fictional physics masquerading as real world, it begins with the very basics that are claimed to be real world science, I have shown that these are fictional fisics. This FRAUD is systematic and has been introduced into the education system so that a whole generation believes in an Alice through the looking glass fantasy impossible physics world, a cartoon world with a different Sun.

The opening post puts the REAL Sun back into the picture – it’s conclusion is unavoidable, this is SYSTEMATIC FRAUD.

“The anti-CO2 policies that your fraudulent “science” has supported are right now destroying the world economy. You idiots are killing our future. Please wake up and try to save your own reputations before your lunatic anti-science ruins us all.”

I therefore think we can safely allow it to go up from 0.04% to 0.4%?
I think that if we did this that more benefit will come to the biosphere.

To put this in perspective, it should be remembered that it took us from 1956 to 2012 (56 years) to get us from 0.03 to 0.04% and not all of that increase is due to man made CO2. A large portion of that increase is due to the natural warming that we experienced over the past 4 decades, if you agree with me that it was natural. Namely, more heat in the oceans, releases more CO2 from the oceans that is dissolved there in the colder waters, from previous times, i.e.
heat + HCO3 =>H20 + CO2
which actually raises the pH
which is (also) better for sea life.

Anyone with ideas how we will ever get to 0.4% CO2 in the atmosphere that we agreed on?

(I am actually amazed if one day we are planning on terra formation, making a planet like Mars habitable, if we don’t teach our kids the truth about global warming / climate change)

AGW sceptic
What is the ideal average global temperature of the earth and why?

Henry says
we cannot influence that….

As my own investigations continued, I came to a cross road where I realized that global warming is really only possible up to a certain point. I believe God gave me that revelation, other people might call it an Eureka moment. Fact is that 70% of earth is covered with water. Natural global warming (more sunshine) must cause the temperature of the water in the oceans to rise. As a result, there must be more evaporation, and that causes more cloudcover. In its turn, this translates into cooling, due to more rain and the extra cloudcover deflecting more light from the sun. Especially here in Africa, I noticed a difference of up to 14 degrees C (cooler) on a day when the clouds move in. ( I measured this in Pretoria on 23/03/10 – this result can be taken as an average for here because of the position of the sun). Now when I considered this, I first stood in amazement again. I remember thinking of the words in Isaiah 40:12-26. I also thought my idea of seeing earth like a giant heat engine and water cooling plant, keeping earth’s temperature more or less constant (within certain limits), must be pretty original. But it was only soon after that I stumbled on a paper from someone who had also been there, done …. (well, God bless him for)…that, in a lot more detail …..look here:

> Natural global warming (more sunshine) must cause the temperature of the water in the oceans to rise. As a result, there must be more evaporation, and that causes more cloudcover

This is wrong. On the off chance that you’re thinking: in a warmer world, to first order relative humidity stays the same, even while absolute humidity increases. Thus, no increase in cloud cover. Or, if you prefer, we have a natural experiment: the earth, from pole to equator. There is no correlation of cloud cover with temperature variation. Or consider interannual or interseasonal variation.

WilliamMC says
There is no correlation of cloud cover with temperature variation.

Henry says (in the same post)
Especially here in Africa, I noticed a difference of up to 14 degrees C (cooler) on a day when the clouds move in. ( I measured this in Pretoria on 23/03/10 – this result can be taken as an average for here because of the position of the sun)

So to first order, in a warmer world relative humidity stays the same. Yet relative humidity has been dropping. Again, fascinating.

BTW, per the Wikipedia Humidity entry, “absolute humidity” is defined in chemical engineering as specific humidity is elsewhere. Therefore: Because of the potential confusion, British Standard BS 1339 (revised 2002) suggests avoiding the term “absolute humidity”.

HenryP says: February 24, 2012 at 9:29 pm. “I am not saying that this discussion about the toxocity of CO2 was on topic, but it flowed naturally from a challenge made by Tim, to tell us how much CO2 would be ideal.”

No, someone else made the challenge about the ideal levels of CO2 & temperature.

And I was actually responding to Smokey’s challenge to refute his broad hypothesis that “more CO2 is better”. While some CO2 is better for some things (like many plants), I was showing that — when taken to extremes, more CO2 is definitely not better for other things (like people). The point was that we need to be careful about hypotheses, stating in what ways more CO2 is better for what organisms in what concentrations.

William MC says
Temperature, very clearly, isn’t even a first-order effect.

Henry@William
Pray, do tell, how clouds come into being,
is it not because at some stage,
in fact at the very first stage,
the water in the oceans/seas/lakes is being evaporated by
the heat (hot temperature) of the sun?
So, pray, do tell,
if more heat is coming in,
as I have proven to you, over the past 3-4 decades,http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming

would that not cause more evaporation, and hence, eventually more cloud formation?

In my view, and in very simple terms, what we have here is a sheepfarming district losing sheep, where one group of farmers believes they have evidence of leopard, and another is convinced that jackals are responsible. In the typical human fashion of seeing black or white, they can’t get to grips with the fact that both might be the culprits.

Your answer: “So basically, it the sun that both heats the oceans and the atmosphere and it is the oceans that keep the temperature of the atmosphere around us more or less constant. (picture earth as a giant water cooling plant).’

Tim Folkerts says:
February 25, 2012 at 8:20 am
HenryP says: February 24, 2012 at 9:29 pm. “I am not saying that this discussion about the toxocity of CO2 was on topic, but it flowed naturally from a challenge made by Tim, to tell us how much CO2 would be ideal.”

No, someone else made the challenge about the ideal levels of CO2 & temperature.

And I was actually responding to Smokey’s challenge to refute his broad hypothesis that “more CO2 is better”. While some CO2 is better for some things (like many plants), I was showing that — when taken to extremes, more CO2 is definitely not better for other things (like people). The point was that we need to be careful about hypotheses, stating in what ways more CO2 is better for what organisms in what concentrations.

======“more CO2 is definitely not better for other things (like people)”

– so you didn’t bother reading my post on this? Nor follow through the link to read more on it?

Over the last 350 million years CO2 has varied by 10 fold, approximately 250 ppm to 2,500 ppm with an average level of 1,500 ppm. This average level happens to be the optimum level for plants, it seems by evolutionary design, and is the reason that this level of CO2 is used in greenhouses Since plants and animals evolved together it’s likely that humans also evolved to function best at some higher level.

However, at 380 ppm we are not far from the lower end of that 10-fold range. Because so many people benefit from enhanced levels of CO2, it appears that our present atmosphere is already lower than the minimum to which some people can adapt. Scientific studies and established medical practices leave no doubt that increased levels of CO2 help people with respiratory problems and, some time in our lives, that will include nearly every one of us.”

> if more heat is coming in,
> as I have proven to you, over the past 3-4 decades,

> would that not cause more evaporation, and hence, eventually more > cloud formation?

Not necessarily. More heat should cause more evaporation, but more heat means the air is warmer, and warmer air can hold more water vapor than cooler air, so the net amount of water in the atmosphere may go up without necessarily the cloud cover going up.

Second, the increase flow of water into the atmosphere may manifest in more rain, which doesn’t necessarily mean more cloud cover.

I’m not an atmospheric expert, but perhaps there would be more cloud if it is warmer, but it doesn’t simplistically follow solely because more water is evaporated.

What has happened to NASA? How can one NASA scientist (can I say division or group) claim that IR energy from the sun does not reach the earth and another NASA group design their equipment to cope with the IR energy that does reach the earth? How can NASA claim that IR energy does not reach the earth, yet it is used in solar water heaters, and other solar heat collectors? Why did my electric bill go down by more than 30% when I placed IR film on my windows? (I heat my home with a heat pump so I already have 50% more than the recommended amount of insulation for this climate.) How much more will it decrease if I paint my windows opaque? How do they get away with this fraud, falsification, can I say lie?

This reminds me of the scam in the 70’s and still prevalent today about saving energy by insulating your hot water pipes. How can this work? Think about it logically. The water in your hot water pipe is cold when you wake up in the morning to take a shower. You run the water to get the water hot, take a shower, then shut it off. Then the water starts cooling. The average household does not use the hot water again until the evening or the next morning. By this time the water is at room temperature. Just how much energy did the insulation save? Only the minuscule amount that would be radiated off of the pipe without the insulation for the period of time the water is running. All of the heat in the pipe left after you shut off the water is lost to the environment. The savings are trivial – about equal to unplugging the unused phone charger, if even that much, which by the way is microwatts when not being used.

Back in the 60’s I served on nuclear submarines in the Navy. At that time we had Doctors on board and one of the things I remember him doing was a study on the effects of CO2 on the Submariners. The levels were typically 10 times the normal, atmospheric, level as the CO2 Scrubber’s could not get the levels much lower. When you are on patrol short distances from enemy territories, you do not come up and exchange air unless necessary for the equipment or medically. I know of no one suffering any ill effects, even as much as increased headaches or other minor problems at these elevated levels. And, it appears to me that more of the people I know that have not served on subs have died at an earlier age than those I know from the sub duty. In searching the internet I have found studies indicating that they have made detailing levels of 8000 ppm for 50 to 60 days in submarines with no ill effects. I have no idea if I was part of that/those study(s), as there are some things the enlisted sailors never know or are told about. I would therefore conclude that 3000 ppm would have no effect on the vast majority of the population.

“I was actually responding to Smokey’s challenge to refute his broad hypothesis that “more CO2 is better”. While some CO2 is better for some things (like many plants), I was showing that — when taken to extremes, more CO2 is definitely not better for other things (like people). The point was that we need to be careful about hypotheses, stating in what ways more CO2 is better for what organisms in what concentrations.”

The real point is that you need to be careful when responding. You set up a strawman and knocked him down. But you avoided the parameters of the hypothesis, which is not “broad” but has definite limits, which you completely ignored. I’ll state it again:

At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and benficial to the biosphere.

It says nothing about taking CO2 levels “to extremes”, only you said that. I said at current and projected levels. It is extremely unlikely that CO2 will double from here because the biosphere is expanding due to more CO2, and soaking it up. In addition, there isn’t enough fossil fuel to double current CO2 levels.

The rise in CO2 is greening the planet; the biosphere is expanding. That is a good thing. No downside has been testably demonstrated. No global or regional harm from the added CO2 has been testably demonstrated. There is simply no evidence of harm of any kind from the rise in that beneficial trace gas. It is still a very tiny trace gas, and even with the projected increase, CO2 will still be a minuscule trace gas.

So the challenge still stands, Tim. That hypothesis has never been falsified. Try again if you like. But do me a favor, and cut ‘n’ paste the hypothesis in italics above. Respond to that, instead of making up things not in the hypothesis, like “when taken to extremes”. As Willis says, quote my words, verbatim.

But what if CO2 increases to 150% of total atmospheric gases. Doesn’t THAT disprove the skeptic’s hypothesis? Doesn’t that PROVE CAGW?

Sheesh. So that’s the level of “science” among the CAGW crowd these days.

Doesn’t the mere fact that (mostly) reasonable people can engage in these very debates completely undermine the “consensus” argument for global seizure of the world’s energy supplies by self-selected and unelected bureaucrats seeking to funnel wealth from the poor and middle class of the first world to the wealthy and powerful of the third world?

Yeah, it does. And that’s without even need to bring up the total failure of the CAGW extremists’ forecasts predicting the last ~15 years of no increase in global temps.

Watching these self-interested power-hungry pseudo-scientist CAGW extremists take their well-deserved plunge into the lower ends of the septic system is, well, justice.

And if a few of the worse miscreants and fraudsters receive lengthy prison sentences for their misdeeds and self-confessed felony crimes, that’s just frosting on the cake.

“At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and benficial to the biosphere.”

I readily agree that there are benefits to elevated CO2 for plant growth. I disagree that CO2 is “harmless”. Any change in conditions will “harm” some organisms and “help” others. And pretty much every agrees that increasing CO2 will lead to SOME increase in temperature.

I live in Kansas. We have similar plant as those found in Nebraska to the north, and Oklahoma to the south, but there are some differences due to the differences in temperature. If the world warms, some plants (and the animals that eat them) in KS would be “harmed”. KS plants might well “move” north to NE, and plants from OK might well “move” north into KS, but there is definite “harm to some plants in some regions. Maps like this (http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/wildseed/info/hardiness.jpeg) would shift, harming many species that are currently growing in the various zones. There is harm being done; it is NOT “harmless”

I can anticipate that you will say the NET result is positive. That may be. But that requires much more study; much more evidence. I will meet you half way and agree that“At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere most plants (everything else being kept equal).”

PS Smokey chides me: “As Willis says, quote my words, verbatim.”
I was responding to your words, verbatim. I was not “making stuff up” as you accused. You said February 23, 2012 at 5:08 am:“CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. More is better.”
You then chided me for not responding to your LATER revision that you posted AFTER my response:“At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and benficial to the biosphere.More is better.“
You should, rather, be thanking me for helping to hone your hypothesis.

February 25, 2012 at 7:44 am
>> WilliamMC says There is no correlation of cloud cover with temperature variation.
> Henry says… a difference of up to 14 degrees C (cooler) on a day when the clouds move in

You took my sentence out of context.
===========================================

Ha, Ha, best chuckle of the day. Blackest pot calling the kettle black. William, you have done this more then a dozen times on this one thread. In fact, often you fail to even link the author or the post time of the authors comment. LOL. (If you disagree I will be happy to copy and paste them, but that would go on for a long time)

Tim, you are clutching at straws. Clearly Smokey is referring to the projected disasters by the alarmists, you know, devastating sea level rise, increasing hurricanes, ever deeper droughts, etc, all the ones that the peer reviewed literature show ARE NOT happening. Whereas the benefits of increasing CO2 are known, not through inaccurate computer models, but from thousands of experiments conducted in the lab and in the field. Furthermore the KNOWN benefits of CO2 continue at least at a linear rate, while the PROJECTED WHAT IF disastourous warming from CO2 decreases in a logarithmic manner.

myrrh says:
February 25, 2012 at 2:56 am
—————————————————-
Long paranoid post. Paranoid in the sense that I am a CAGW sceptic, and my one post to you explained how the veacity of your comments was not relevant. to what I was trying to articulate. You have tried to linlk your theory, to Alec Rawls concerning the peer reviewed solar science being ignored by the IPCC. CO2s affect within the atmosphere could hijack every thread, and I guess, that as you are allowed to do so so often, you will continue to hijack those threads in which you participate. You called me “scared” as if I was debating you. Sorry, not interested. My suggestion for those who love to turn every post into a CO2 debate, whas that a side bar be set up. If your efforts in this post and been to force W.C. to actually address what Alec wrote, and to admit that Alec directly answered his questions with peer reviewed literature and explanations, both in the “Header Post, and in subsequent comments, then you what have been far more effective in countering CAGW fraud.